“Here I should like to quote from a review of Living the Good Life, by Helen and Scott Nearing.* Says the editor: ‘What we are trying to suggest is that the solution for a cluttered, frustrated existence is not merely in moving to the country and attempting to practise ‘the simple life.’ The solution is an attitude towards human experience which makes simple physical and economic arrangements almost a moral and esthetic necessity. It is the larger purpose in life which gives to its lesser enterprises—the obtaining of food, shelter and clothing—their essential harmony and balance. So often people dream of an ideal life “in community,” forgetting that a “community” is not an end in itself, but a frame for higher qualities—the qualities of the mind and of the heart. Making a community is not a magic formula for happiness and good; making a community is the result of the happiness and the good which people already possess in principle, and the community, whether of one family or several, is the infinitely variable expression of the excellences of human beings, and not their cause….’
Digging in at Big Sur eleven years ago, I must confess that I had not the least thought or concern about the life of the community. With a population of one hundred souls scattered over several hundred square miles, I was not even conscious of a latent ‘community.’ My community then comprised a dog, Pascal (so named because he had the sorrowful look of a thinker), a few trees, the buzzards, and a seeming jungle of poison oak. My only friend, Earl White, lived three miles down the road. The hot sulphur baths were three miles further down the road. There the community ended, from my standpoint.
I soon found out how mistaken I was, of course. It was no time before neighbors began popping up from all sides—out of the brush, it seemed—and always laden with gifts, as well as the most discrete and sensible advice, for the ‘newcomer.’ Never have I known better neighbors! All of them endowed with a tact and subtlety such as I never ceased to marvel at. They came only when they sensed you had need of them. As in France, it seemed to me that I was once again among people who knew how to let you be. And always there was a standing invitation to join them at table, should you have need of food or company.
Being one of those unfortunate ‘helpless’ individuals who knew nothing but city ways, it wasn’t long before I had to call upon my neighbors for aid of one kind or another. Something was always going amiss, something was always getting out of order. I hate to think what would have happened had I been left entirely to my own resources! Anyway, with the assistance that was always willing and cheerfully extended, I received instruction in how to help myself, the most valuable gift that can be offered. I discovered all too quickly that my neighbors were not only extremely affable, helpful, generous in every way, but that they were far more intelligent, far wiser, far more self-sufficient that I had fatuously thought myself to be. The community, from being at first an invisible web, gradually became most tangible, most real. For the first time in my life I found myself surrounded by kind souls who were not thinking exclusively of their own welfare. A strange new sense of security began to develop in me, one I had never known before. In fact, I would boast to visitors that, once a resident of Big Sur, nothing evil could possibly happen to one. I would always add cautiously: ‘But one has first to prove himself a good neighbor!’ Though they were addressed to my visitor, I meant these words for myself. And often, when the visitor had departed, I would repeat them to myself like a litany. It took time, you see, for one who had always lived in the jungle life of the big city to realize that he too could be ‘a neighbor.’
Here I must say flatly, and not without a bad conscience, that I am undoubtedly the worst neighbor any community could boast of. That I am still treated with more than mere tolerance is something which still surprises me.”
* [From Manas, Los Angeles, March 23, 1955]
—Henry Miller in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (New York: New Directions, 1957)
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