Whatever Happened to The Good Life?
by Paul De Angelis
The other night I heard a radio interview with a journalist who had lobbied with her editors to send her to Baghdad. She felt she needed to be there to cover the real war story. Listening to her sometimes hair-raising tales stoked a disquiet that’s bothered me since September 11, 2001. Since then, wars undertaken by this nation have destroyed or disrupted the lives of thousands both here and abroad . . . while I’ve continued to prosper in my adopted rural corner of the Northeast.
It would be impossible to present a complete list of the blessings I enjoy: a happy family life; gainful self-employment divided between a home office set in a bucolic landscape of rolling hills and a publication office in a converted red brick factory building; outstanding public and private schools (my daughter attended both); a religious population that is by and large enlightened; a town and community whose citizens cultivate local roots while maintaining connections to the wider world; a host of both professional and participatory cultural opportunities at hand or accessible by daily excursion.
Living this kind of life fulfills many of the dreams of my youth, even if it falls short of some reveries of fame and glory. Vows I made as a teenager not to be swallowed into what I saw as the suburban conformity and bureaucratic tedium of my parents’ lives have been kept. After years working in the merged monoliths of commercial book publishing in New York City I have now been my own boss for over a decade. Far from feeling either impoverished or marginalized, I feel richer and more centered. It took luck and persistence to build this “alternative” life, and it did not really seem to jell completely until the second year of the millennium. By then it felt that, despite some political disappointment, I might go on living my dream of the good life indefinitely. It was not to be.
Just as “the good life” arrived I was reminded how fragile it was. The attacks of September 11 did not emerge out of a vacuum, but they shattered my cultural complacency. Before, my vision of personal fulfillment jibed perfectly with the national mood. Once my country started bouncing around remote parts of the world refashioning governments, I couldn’t avoid trying to sort out my own ideas of “national purpose”—or any purpose greater than my own well-being. My instinct was to retreat into my safe haven. But was such a thing as the good life possible any more? Was it true that “everything changed” on September 11? That was the argument President Bush used so effectively in persuading Americans to undertake the very kind of foreign wars that protestors of his and my generation had sworn to prevent.
Certainly something changed that day. A flood of city dwellers found a new urgency to their dreams of sinking roots in the land. What had once been “dropping out” was becoming more and more like “dropping in.” There was really nowhere to go to escape again: the American war in Afghanistan and Iraq made it clear that technology can and does reach anybody anywhere . . . if often bluntly and with unexpected after-effects.
The vision of a “good life”—with its underpinnings in a 60s concept of a simpler, holistic connectedness, had been such an animating force during my first half century of life that I was not about to give it up overnight. Yet I could no longer take it for granted. Just as I had spent many hours since 9/11 “catching up” on aspects of politics and world history I knew little about before then, I decided I would need to catch up this bit of personal history: to re-examine some of the concepts that had been influential in my life to date and figure out what they meant for me now.
Living the Good Life
The first stop on this road was obvious to me: Helen and Scott Nearing’s Living the Good Life. In the 70s while I spent one of my first periods of “rural retreat” on the Maine seacoast the Nearings were living nearby. I heard a lot about them and their book, which had become a sort of bible for 60s-style back-to-the earth communalists. The first surprise of Living the Good Life is its publication date. I thought of it as a book from the 60s, yet it was originally published in 1954 and the period it describes is the Nearings’ homesteading adventure in a remote rural valley in Vermont during the 1930s and 40s. The second surprise is the book’s decidedly un-60s tone. It may have been composed around the time of Kerouac’s On The Road, but it would be hard to imagine anything less beat than the Nearings’ prescriptions for heaven on earth.
The Nearings move “back to the land” was undertaken in a self-consciously directed way, as a social experiment and political statement. They set up a list of principles and rules for themselves and their frequent visitors, most of whom, expecting more of a retreat and less of a work schedule, did not stay long. Those who did were expected to spend their mornings building, gardening or maple sugaring, and to devote the rest of the day to contemplative, reflective, or creative activities.
Many of the Nearings’ rules seem valid and prescient. Architecture using rough-hewn, natural materials that conforms to the landscape rather than dominates it, organic gardening, composting, vegetarianism and later veganism—such practices have long since become important elements of mainstream culture, whether rural, urban or suburban. The Nearings could also be pragmatic and adapt to local conditions—as when they discovered that efficiently producing and selling a native cash crop like maple sugar would underwrite their entire operation.
Still, many of the Nearings’ rules and principles reflect a 50s faith in rational planning and abstract organizational models that are unresponsive to the human condition. For example, the way they articulate some rules, such as their refusal to own or raise any kind of animal, seems austere and doctrinaire. They also lack much interest in children, child-rearing or education, perhaps because the couple was apparently childless. They weren’t very curious about local culture or history either. All of which makes their sympathy with the behavioral psychologist-guru B. F. Skinner’s manipulative ideas of social organization unsurprising. As they themselves admit, their successes were mostly economic and their failures social: they largely failed in their larger attempt to create a community of like-minded people.
Donovan and the 60s
Enter the 60s and the “me” generation (including me). In the late 60s we were a youthful mass that in the space of a few years had been cut loose from one social convention after another. The authority of the liberal conscience many of us had been raised with had crumbled in the midst of riots, assassinations, and the Vietnam War. Here was a population for the community the Nearings had sketched out but never fully realized.
As it turns out, one of the mass culture bards from those days, the pop singer Donovan, has recently published hisautobiography. I hadn’t heard a record of his or anything about him for decades. Maybe he’d dropped out to some inner life or greater purpose?
The Autobiography of Donovan: The Hurdy Gurdy Man, with its emphasis on changing the world by changing one's self first, is fully representative of our generation’s overweening subjectivism. As a teenager I mostly liked Donovan's early, more folky songs like “Catch the Wind,” but later dismissed the pop-electric works (“Call me mellow yellow”) as naïve and clichéd. I came to the book expecting to grimace most of the way through. To my surprise, there was little to grimace at, apart from many too many pages of song lyrics. Donovan has long since put his naiveté behind him. Beneath the somewhat bland voice lies an appealing maturity.
How or why Donovan Leitch (his full name) attained this seasoning is impossible to say. The book gives little clue. The time frame he selects for the book prioritizes celebrity gossip about the Beatles and others, presumably to satisfy the book’s 60s nostalgia market. But it forces him to leave out almost entirely his own pop star afterlife. Yet Donovan’s chronicle of the frenetic life of an idol is humdrum. There are really only two emotionally gripping sections of the narrative. The first recalls the young Donovan’s few months of gypsy wandering along the coast of Cornwall, England, when he first “dropped out” of normal life.The second is his six-week reclusion, in the company of the Beatles at the Maharishi’s retreat in India during the height of his fame. These passages and occasional other references in the book make it clear that a sustainable “good life” ‘for Donovan really only began in earnest after he left behind the life of a super star. Even the love interest narrative that creates the only element of continuity for the reader during Donovan’s endless rounds of pop concerts is meaningful only because it was fulfilled after the book’s narrative closes.
Cultural Roots & A Sense of Place
So Donovan remains an enigma. His silence about whatever fulfillment he has found in his own life speaks volumes. Has the 60s cult of experience really provided so little wisdom in all thesse years? Have our ideas about the “good life” really evolved so little?
Something else sticks with me from Donovan’s book: the few pages of Scottish dialect he opens with, his repeated evocations of his Scottish roots, his brief flirtation with living on a remote island near Skye, his attempts to frame his music as “Celtic Fusion.” The Nearings’ example of rootedness and autonomy pointed to local models as alternatives to the standardized, centralized mainstream, but it was still a utopian program that floated above, or beside, all specifics of culture and ethnicity, let alone class.
Donovan, on the other hand, sees his cultural roots as a vital part of his self-identity. This attachement reminds me of a similar need in my own life to explore my own family and ethnic heritage. I and others emerged from a postwar generation that was no longer going to be defined by the “culture-blind” economic prescriptions of our fathers (including the Nearings). The search for a identity and a place to belong would have specific attributes, history, culture—character, and a sense of place. Those criteria eventually landed me—a third-generation Italian-American from Washington DC with New England roots— in a couple of small towns in the Hudson Valley and northwest Connecticut. I too did my part to fill, with “raised consciousness,” the Nearings’ empty vessel.
So what can it mean to be both small town and counter-cultural when rural is becoming exurban and alternative, mainstream? Even the "safe haven" aspect of small town life is proving a fiction: volunteer emergency responders here are as much on the front lines of preparedness against terrorist infiltration and attack as big city fire and police departments. We can even point to our own homegrown targets—our rivers, small (less rigorously controlled) airports, dams, reservoirs and, of course, Indian Point.
Nonetheless, I believe the small town difference still matters. For me, back-to-the-land small town life in the “rural” Northeast may no longer be idyllic, nor particularly rural, but it has become the hub of its own social and cultural universe. No longer the anti-thesis of mainstream, we can still offer an alternative, if we ever try to articulate it. Isn't it time we small-town 60s dropouts did more to define our adopted homes as something other than refuges, and ourselves as something other than refugees?
