In a recent discussion with my eldest son Ben this week (you should know, Gentle Reader, that Ben and I cover deep territory in our talks: literature and theology and philosophy, and Ben always acts like he thinks I understand what he is talking about, which is very gracious of him) we turned to talking about the agrarian movement, and utopian movements in general. This topic came up because I am reading Thomas Hardy's Far from the Madding Crowd, and Ben identified this as English agrarian literature. He claims we Americans tend to read seriously English agrarian literature and take it at face value, while if we were reading the same novel placed in the antebellum South, we would dismiss it as a romanticized version of reality. He then went on to describe agrarian literature as doing the same thing as progressive literature, but in retrograde. In other words, where the progressive plants his utopia in the future and grasps towards a future than can never be reality, the agrarian places his utopia in the past and grasps towards what never was. We went on to discuss Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry, and the fact that you rarely hear the agrarians talk about the stagnation that can occur in a rural setting, nor the fact that breaking into such communities results in just as much displacement often as breaking out of them does.
I found these fascinating ideas, and have been pondering them ever since. And I feel blessed to have had such conversations with a child of mine, grown to adulthood, and surpassing me in many ways. And he is becoming a friend in a way childhood never allowed. I feel like he is rising up in the gates and calling me blessed because he enjoys my conversation, and has so much to teach me. What a joy to watch your children leap ahead of you. May each of you, Gentle Readers, be so blessed!
