Patrick Deneen caught the Off Broadway revival of “Our Town,” and had some thoughts upon leaving the theater. Excerpt:
The juxtaposition of Grover’s Corner and New York captures the essence of two different worldviews. In the one, the challenge of human life is to reconcile our capacious longings with our need for home, belonging and fellowship, and the scales are tilted decisively in favor of the latter. Mrs. Gibbs speaks longingly in the first Act of her desire to visit Paris before her death, but we discover at the end of the play that she gives her “legacy” – which was to fund her journey – to her daughter and her new husband so that they can make some repairs on their farm. The play’s end shows us that our ultimate orientation toward Eternity throws into relief the insignificance of the affairs of daily life, yet that the modest daily acts of cooking, cleaning, discussing the day’s events, are suffused with a kind of beauty and significance that too easily escapes us when we fail to notice the fact of living. The fellowship of those with whom we pass our lives, and with whom we ultimately lay in burial, connects the diurnal to the eternal.
In the other worldview – there again all around me as I exited the play into the Village bar scene in full swing – institutionalizes discontent, reinforces restlessness, and fosters and endless and intense suspicion that something better lies around the corner, reducing any commitment we might have to the “given” in favor of the “not yet.” “Belonging” is understood to be complacency; limits are seen as unacceptable oppressions; imperfection is a condition needing cure, solution, repair – and barring those, escape. Both conditions generate regret, because we are creatures of belonging and longing.
You have here something that’s not too far from the story of Ruthie and Rod. You can’t go home again, it is true, but it’s also true that consciousness of my dilemma is not the same thing as deliverance from it. Maybe there is some art yet to be created out of it.
posted April 27, 2010 at 8:13 pm
This was a lovely piece, but I enjoyed the link to “Ruthie and Rod” even more. What a beautiful tribute to your sister.
posted April 27, 2010 at 9:51 pm
Maybe this could help your cause:
its about Ratzinger.
Website post photos of what they say is the authentic third secret of Fatima.
http://www.cathinfo.com/catholic.php/Website-post-photos-of-what-they-say-is-the-authentic-third-secret-of-Fatim
http://catholicforum.fisheaters.com/index.php/topic,3429460.0.html
http://the-end-of-evil.blogspot.com/2010/04/el-secreto-es-anunciado_21.html
http://beatimonoculiinterracaecorum.blogspot.com/2010/04/terceiro-segredo-de-fatima.html
http://sublimeverdade.blogspot.com/
http://www.phatmass.com/phorum/index.php?showtopic=104752
posted April 27, 2010 at 10:30 pm
Wonderful post.
posted April 28, 2010 at 12:31 am
In the other worldview – there again all around me as I exited the play into the Village bar scene in full swing – institutionalizes discontent, reinforces restlessness, and fosters and endless and intense suspicion that something better lies around the corner, reducing any commitment we might have to the “given” in favor of the “not yet.” “Belonging” is understood to be complacency; limits are seen as unacceptable oppressions; imperfection is a condition needing cure, solution, repair – and barring those, escape. Both conditions generate regret, because we are creatures of belonging and longing.
Grover’s Corners vs. Manhattan – post title
I wonder how the residents of the Village, or those from away partaking of its “bar scene”, will feel to be slotted as the heavies in Deneen’s set-piece culture-war polarities, whose thesis sentence would seem to be Small Town Good, Big Bad City Bad, or how popping in for a bit of Off-Broadway theater (wholesome) manages to ‘scape the whipping dished out to those luckless enough to be enjoying a nice beer a block away (decadent). Are Village residents, and the particular forms of community they form, hospitality establishments not excepted, not entitled to file for the sort of treacly “belonging” status Deneen & Co. apply.
Nine tenths of what you, reader, and I enjoy in modern life, cultural and technological, is the result, direct or indirect, of people leaving the towns and lands of their fathers for pastures new, world without end. Trees have roots; men have legs, and roaming is the very warp and woof of our condition and our history. Cosy feelings about Home, wherever that be, are all well and good, but when you feel the need to validate them in denigrate the life-choices of those from or choosing Away as a way of life, assuming them by default to be subject to an alienated condition from which you are for some reason consecrated in your exemption, is simply a snobbery inverted from the immemorial sort donned by those bohemian transplants who presume themselves “liberated” and the small townies they left behind benighted – Stuff Crunchy People Like for those whose spiritual status markers come at the price of a cordon sanitaire erected around those presumed fallen due to not having apparently seen the light of a redemptive homecoming. Complacency cuts both ways; why one chosen way of life is authentic, and the other decadent is, as here, not demonstrated but merely assumed in a blanket of rhetorical tropes of alienation that the reader might have been forgiven the assumption that it issued from a Frankfurt School Marxist rather than an organic pietist.
posted April 28, 2010 at 8:45 am
Along with what Scott said, I’ll mention that small towns have bar scenes too.
posted April 28, 2010 at 8:54 am
I don’t think Deneen can possibly know what’s in the heads and hearts of the denizens of the Village. For all he knows, the people in those bars have lived in the Village a long time (longer, perhaps, than he has lived in the DC area), and are patronizing their favorite local water holes.
I would be interested to know Deneen’s personal history. I sometimes wonder if anyone (besides Wendell Berry and a handful of writers on FPR) who espouses the “go home” message is actually living it. And if they are not, there are always reasons — usually very legitimate ones.
I think the question for anyone feeling wistful about a home left behind is: if you could do it over again, would you have stayed?
I left my hometown when I left home for college, and I’ve never looked back. (I have stayed close to my family who is still there, but I’ve never wished I had settled in my hometown.) Because I left I met my husband, and in some ways my life didn’t really begin until we met. And because I married my husband I have my marvelous children. I would not trade my life as it is for anything in the world.
I appreciate your struggle with this issue, Rod. And I think you may be right, there may be art to come from your struggle with this. At the same time, from what you have written on your blog, it sounds like staying in your hometown would not have led you to a satisfying life. Would you have met your wife if you had stayed? From what you have written here, it seems like your life might have been quite unhappy had you remained at home. You’d always be looking over your shoulder, wondering what’s out there. Avoiding unhappiness is not the only goal in life, to be sure, but it’s something to be considered.
I guess I think you know the answer to this dilemma. You did the right thing in leaving.