Chekhov once said that literature was his mistress and medicine his lawful wedded wife, and that when he tired of one, he flew to the other. I confess I feel the same about the town and country: and if I now feel more at ease in the country, advancing age and the desire for peace might account for it.
The relative advantages of urban and rural life have long been a matter of dispute, never fully resolved because never fully resolvable. The disagreement is like that between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, the Classical and the Romantic; or perhaps it is like one of those drawings, beloved of gestalt psychologists, that can be seen either as two old crones facing one another or as a giant vase, but not as both at the same time.
The poet Wordsworth put the case for the rural life in his Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, the book of poems that he originally published in 1798 with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The influential text decisively turned English literature—at least for a time—from Classicism to Romanticism. Explaining his choice of rural subject matter, Wordsworth wrote:
Low and rustic life was generally chosen because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.
Since the spirit of opposition arises in me whatever I read, I want to reply, “Yes, but what of Marx’s famous phrase, ‘the idiocy of rural life’?” Is it likely that the farm workers of Wordsworth’s time, after a hard day’s scything in the fields, responded poetically to the beauty of their surroundings? I recall the time when, as a young man, I travelled to Scotland in the summer, and in a bar on the island of Skye, I went into dithyrambs about the beauty of the landscape and how wonderful it must be to live among it all the time. A lugubrious Scotsman next to me said laconically, “You should be here in f***ing February,” whereupon I immediately felt exceedingly foolish.
Charles Lamb, Wordsworth’s essayist friend and a Londoner, advanced the opposite point of view. Doctor Johnson had famously said that a man who was tired of London was tired of life, for there was in London all that life could afford—and Lamb agreed:
For my part … I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth, and sea, and sky (when all is said) is but as a house to dwell in. … Just as important to me … is all the furniture of my world .… Streets, streets, streets, markets, theatres, churches, Covent Gardens … These are thy pleasures, O London with-the-many-sins. O City abounding in whores, for these may Keswick and her giant brood go hang!
Here Lamb is referring to the exceptional beauty of the English Lake District, with its magnificent lakes and hills, where Wordsworth made his home.
The preference for urban rather than rural life has its own romanticism, and is found in surprising places—for example, as in this excerpt from “En el campo” by the late 19th-century Cuban poet, Julián del Casal:
Tengo el impuro amor de las ciudades
y a este sol que ilumina las edades,
profiero yo del gas las claridades.
…………………
Más que al raudal que baja de la cumbre,
quiero oír a la humana muchedumbre
gimiendo en su perpetua servidumbre.
(I have the impure love of cities
and, to the sun that lights the ages,
I prefer gaslight.
…………………
More than the torrent falling from the mountain top,
I long to hear the human multitude
groaning in its perpetual servitude.)
Indeed, there is poetry to be heard even in the lower depths of cities, in which I spent much of my medical career, and which served as the foundation of my literary activity, such as it has been. I, like Charles Lamb, came almost to need what I also despised and deprecated, the crime and squalor, the noise and ugliness, the cruelty and callousness, the pullulating life. How my heart leapt in sheer but guilty delight, when a patient said to me that she had asked her boyfriend not to strangle her in front of the children, or another said that he sometimes felt like the little boy with his finger in the dike, or a murderer saying that he had to kill his girlfriend! As a furnisher of stories, the city is inexhaustible, more inventive than the country can ever be.
Especially in modern times, those who extol the country life over the city life seem to me often guilty of a certain dishonesty, at least if they are not simply talking of their personal taste rather than of a recommendation for the whole of humanity. Not long ago, I read a book by Jean Giono, published in 1937, called La Vraie richesse (Real Wealth), which exults the simple, honest life of Provence and its simple joys over the dishonest artificialities of Paris. One knows what he means, of course—but for whom was he writing the book? Certainly not for the peasants of Provence. Moreover, when one considers what it takes to produce a book that is to sell in any numbers, as every author hopes his will, one quickly realises that universal rurality is not to be desired, whatever any author may say. He who wills the end—the sale of books—wills the means.
Much of the rural life in the midst of nature, so ardently praised and wished for, is not a desire for the untouched wilderness, for which comparatively few have a taste, at least of a durable nature. Wildernesses are full of inconveniences and discomforts, to say nothing of dangers, and modern man is not very adept at dealing with any of those things. He wants ice in his drinks and not many insects in his bedroom.
When people say they want to live in the country, surrounded by nature, they usually mean by it a domesticated (or semi-domesticated) landscape, which is actually the product of human art and labour that has long acted on the wilderness. And in truth, there are few more beautiful landscapes than these. It is not for nothing that the greatest landscape painters do not paint the wildest and most sublime landscapes, but those to which the denizens of cities dream of retiring, either after a life of strenuous endeavour, or for a weekend to refresh themselves.
Enough of carping, though. I write this in my country retreat in France, surrounded, if not by original wilderness exactly, then at least by something very different from urban hustle and bustle. There is no house to be seen from where I write. The pale green lichen on the old oak tree nearest me delights me. I have enjoyed a succession of the most reassuring sounds: the woodpecker’s drilling of a hollow dead tree, the cuckoo’s strangely soothing repetitiousness, the cry of the golden oriole, the frogs’ love song, the owls’ conversations at night, the whirr of the beetles on the wing, the cicadas’ tireless mating call, the wild boars’ snuffling as they root for food, and the unearthly rutting cry of the deer, with not an ambulance or police siren in earshot for months at a time (how those sirens put one on edge and cause one to feel on the threshold of danger!).
The little dramas of nature ceaselessly enthral me: the dramatic yellow and black spider that goes from thin and fusiform to round and fat after a single meal of an entrapped insect; the red wasp that specialises in killing large green grasshoppers bigger than itself before dragging them back to its nest; the lizards that chase one another in the search for dominance, and are very choosy about the ants that they will eat when they cross their path; the lugubrious toad with profound amber eyes that scarcely moves when exposed by the gardener’s fork or spade, as if reliant on its well-known ugliness and poison skin for survival; the jewelled kingfisher that darts across the stream and, by its transience in view, recalls you to the fleetingness of your existence—a fleetingness perhaps necessary to human endeavour.
How sad it is that so much of humanity now will never know any of these things, or anything like them! Whether one can feel deprived of that which one had never known is a difficult question, but it seems to me that this lack of acquaintance is not just one lacuna among many other lacunae. To lose all contact with the natural world promotes a kind of illiteracy of the soul.
But now I must retreat indoors: the mosquitoes have come out, and they whine in my ears, like disgruntled plaintiffs; their bite is now nearly intolerable.
This essay appears in the Fall/Autumn 2024 issue of The European Conservative, Number 32:31-33.
