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8. A Big World and Little Men
- University of Wisconsin Press
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8 A Big World and Little Men Those who take city children out into the country for a day's airing can tell you one story after another about how squirrels and rabbits are classed as cats, cattle as horses, sheep as woolly dogs, how green things are just grass, a tree merely a tree. They will tell you that this is the tragedy of urban civilization,-to rear children who live in a half-noticed, carelessly classified universe, as dumb to them as the stony pavements that serve as their playgrounds. And yet city children are far from being especially dullwitted . They are simply dull to an environment which really does not concern them. A country boy may go fearlessly among restless animals or find a trail through the woods, but a street-urchin will play baseball in the midst of traffic. Yet we feel a pathetic difference between them, for one is competent amidst enduring things, the other is quick about artificial complications. The city-dweller never meets as a personal problem the elements that have ordered human life, plants and animals, the tides and the winds, forest and hill. He may work at some abstract part of a complicated manufacture, or spend his time in an office where he deals the day long with papers and telephones, the symbols and shadows of events. He has practically no sense of how he is fed, clothed, or housed, has seen no spinning and weaving, mining or reaping. He has witnessed the milking of one cow with mixed astonishment , has forgotten that steaks come from cattle, and mutton chops from sheep, knows that clover occasionally appears with four 91 A BIG WORLD AND LITTLE MEN leaves and signifies good luck, and spring to him means not sowing time, and the opening of streams, but open cars and straw hats. This uprooted person is the despair of all those who love the flavor of words, for his language has gone stale and abstract in a miserly telegraphic speech. That is why literary men are forever hunting up folk songs and seeking out backward peasants in Galway or Cornwall. Among country people words still taste of actual things: contact with sun and rain and earth and harvest turns the simple prose of the day's work into poetry for the starved imaginations of city-bred people. There has been, to be sure, a brave attempt in recent years to admire slang. But one insuperable difficulty stands in the way: city slang has risen out of the interests that meet the thwarted instincts of a restless population, from the bleachers, the poker table, and the saloon. Slang is often vivid but it is too deeply sundered from the older sources of our happiness. It is not set in the spectacle of earth and sky, as the speech of peasants, and it is for the most part trivial, strained, and raucous. Even the slang of lust is feeble, reflected out of halted fantasy and filtered through commercialism . The obscenity of a smoking-room is little more than the sneaking indulgence of peeping Toms, witty at times because it comes as a relief from the seductive wrappings of a finicky culture. But even lust has become elaborate and second-hand. For the slow movement of the seasons we have substituted the flicker of fashions. The older world changed, but it repeated itself. Birth and youth and age, summer and winter changed the world and left it unaltered. You could think of eternal ideas, for there was beneath the change some permanence. But in our day change is not an illusion but a fact: we do actually move toward novelty, there is invention, and what has never been is created each day. We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange situation. We are not used to a complicated civilization, we don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared . There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment more quickly than we know how to change ourselves. And so we are literally an eccentric people, our emotional life is 92 [3.17.75.14] Project MUSE (2024-04-18 00:10 GMT) A BIG WORLD AND LITTLE MEN disorganized, our passions are...