COUNTRY LIFE IS DULL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 191, 19 February 1943, Page 6

COUNTRY LIFE IS DULL

(Written for "The Listener" by

F. L.

COMBS

OUNTRY people are staunch. If you have it in you to be a friend, you will make real friends in the country. The growth of such friendships is slow, but their roots go deep. Country people are not quick (or eager), to know you, but they hold by those they take to, But life in the country is dull. In winter there may be spells of that selfkilling process known as killing time. By the country one means here the backblocks or an area of two to three hun-dred-acre farms, Why is life in the country dull? The sound farmer’s mind is stored with a diversity of information, but quite often it is a garnered experience that has not become articulate. His knowledge guides his practice, and he therefore feels no primary need to put it into words, Moreover, such a farmer’s days are long and full. When he might be at leisure, he is tired. So his thinking keeps close to his activities. If G.B.S. is right in saying that farming is six businesses rolled into one, it needs to. An industrious farmer finds his working day pretty self-sufficing. * * * LIFE in the country is dull. Its patterns, except for the seasons, remain constant, and the seasons repeat themselves. Events accommodate themselves to the season’s slow tempo. Towns have a man-made rhythm. The countryside’s rhythm is basically that of Nature deliberately mellowing (not quickening) from stage to stage. Country people become self-absorbed and localised. The near, the immediate, and the everyday, as regards people and events, hold their attention, The more remote in time and space is of little concern. Horizons in the country are somewhat narrowly bounded. Where good farming is the rule, there is even a plant-like attachment.to the soil, In the town, and particularly among town children, ever-varying aspects cause something like an imaginative ferment. As time passes, habits-settled habits-

become endeared to rural folk, Habit stabilises life, but its grooves are anything but the poet’s ringing grooves of change. It is the personal bond rather than the charms of intercourse that gives social life its value in the country. % % * N a modern countryside there is too much isolation. Human beings are very gregarious animals. For tens of thousands of years they herded together in villages-- often very large villages. The Great Village Belt, interrupted today by towns, still stretches its 8,000 miles from Gibraltar to Japan, Farm-ing-colonial farming with its mile distances between homesteads--is not village life; it thwarts this deep-seated herd instinct and as a consequence, the craving for community of kind is partly starved. Go into a country post-office store at night-fall and you will see people who feel-though they do not perhaps think it-that their days have been spent too much alone. The stimulus of human contacts is needed to give life variety and vivacity. It then becomes rife with new interests deep or shallow, Even mere being together-a low-grade gratification -is something. It explains the glamour of thronged and bustling streets at a time when quiet ones 20 yards away offer more chance of true social intercourse. The adolescent feels most the dullness of the country, due to lack of abundant human contacts-a lack which partly, though not mainly, explains "the drift to the towns." When the real village really throve -say 200 to 10,000 years ago-there was no such drift. But then such villages offered a full and varied life. They had the numbers and the diversity of callings and human types to do it. ‘ a * HAT solution is there for the dullness of the country and hence for the serious problems to which it gives rise? On the short view there seems none, At least none has so far been found, But taking the long view, there (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) seems to-day no need why people should endure the semi-exile of living out their lives in thinly-settled rural areas. The factory, as regards methods, is as much present in the country to-day as in the town. And factory methods tend to large-scale processes as much in the fields as in the workshops. U.S.A, was not the first, Russia will not be the last country to be collectivised-to farm areas rather than sections. When furrows thus run mile-long lengths, when the machinist and the machine have finished taking over what is still largely a handicraft, what is to prevent exodus and alternation, that of people at present too much tied to the countryside, to the cities, that also of people becoming too citified to the country? That such sojourns far from busy haunts are essentials of human culture, our wisest poet Wordsworth knew. And Dickens, the poet of crowded streets, proved the opposite equally true. Perhaps God made both country and town and His Eternal Adversary made it his malevolent task to keep them apart.