Baby I'll be there to take your hand
Baby I'll be there to share the land
that they'll be giving away
when we all live together.
(Who are "they"? And why are they giving away land?)
But it goes much farther back than that.
Pastoral poetry that evokes the simple pleasures of rural life is one of our oldest literary traditions; the earliest known examples are written in Sumerian.
Here is a famous example by Christopher Marlowe:
Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.
It seems that the high-pressure life of an old royal court, full of politics and intrigue that might end with a knife in your back, encouraged the fantasy that shepherds had a better kind of life.
But it's all nonsense. Simple rural life is hard even for people who grew up with it, and it is almost impossible for those who did not. I have a friend who actually spent some time on a hippie commune, and she once said to me, "You know, there are reasons why we all left."
Lots of reasons. The work is hard and unrelenting, with many chores that must be done every single day. The amusements are limited. And the politics of the average commune, while perhaps not as bloody as those of a Renaissance court, can be quite awful. The communes that still endure in our time all have very strict policies about who can join, along with probationary periods and the like, and they still have high turnover.
These days only about 2% of Israelis live on a Kibbutz, and some of these are actually more like gated communities than farming communes.
But when people feel under great social or economic stress, or feel that their beliefs are at odds with those of the majority, or believe that their societies have grown wicked and decadent, these fantasies keep coming up over and over.
3 comments:
Personally I'm fairly susceptible to Arcadian fantasies, but I've always loved the comment attributed either to Max Jacob or Baudelaire: "The country? You mean that place where chickens run around raw?"
Here, in rural Virginia, one needs a full time job to support one’s farming habit. Having and maintaining the proverbial 100 acres IS a full time job, even with the minimal work of chickens and 12 raised garden beds. I’d love to have folks helping, but no one is interested. Once had a comment about my gift of fresh picked peas: “Would be nice if they were shelled.” Around here everyone knows that off-farm work is way easier than on-farm labor!
I can only imagine that Industrialism and dense urbanization did a lot to popularize and spread the fantasy, even if it is ancient. If you lived in the crowded, filthy, ugly, noisy, smoke-filled, shit-strewn streets of some poor Victorian neighborhood, you no doubt thought of a small farmstead as downright idyllic.
Hard work? Sure - but when you work in a factory, or a foundry, or some other horrible, busy, cramped, hot, stuffy, noise-filled, dangerous industrial setting... you're already doing hard work. Thus, the idea of a place away from it all, with fresh air and quiet and green things growing everywhere sounds like heaven in comparison. If you can do hard manual labor all day locked into a soot-chocked brick building full of whirring machinery, you can do hard manual labor all day in the open fields and the woods, with a cool breeze on your back, and no overseer on a catwalk above to yell at you if you stop to catch your breath and sit down for a break when you need one.
Sure - royal courtiers of old, or whatever else, had their own wishes for a rural life. But their versions, I am quite sure, had the silent implication that they would live a simple life on a farm as wealthy owners, and that they wouldn't do much of the actual work themselves. After all, that's what slaves, or serfs, or tenant farmers are for - you own the land, the commoners work it and give you a portion of what they produce, and in exchange they get to... not be homeless and not starve.
When the elites fantasize about escaping to the countryside, they're fantasizing about running a farm (or a plantation, or whatever else) rather than working one.
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