Loving and Leaving the Good Life by Helen Nearing

Author:Helen Nearing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2011-02-26T05:00:00+00:00

We tried to keep a money relationship with the neighbors to a minimum. We occasionally hired their help in the woods and in house building and sometimes exchanged labor. Aside from these contacts we were tolerated as odd folk "from away," as they said, or outsiders, who worked as hard as they did or even harder.

Our main differences from the natives were our work habits and our diet. I have overheard remarks like: "I couldn't live without any meat." "They got no animals. No radio neither. Music though; they got music." "They eat with chopsticks, out of wooden bowls." "How'd they ever get those rocks so smooth? Chiseled 'em, I guess."

Even our growing of flowers to give away was considered strange. A friend from the city who visited us wrote the following satiric verse on "The Flower People":

Their chief delight was growing, picking, giving away

sweet peas.

When taking a trip to town in blooming season

They filled baskets, basins, pails—with dozens of

bunches,

And gave them out during the day—to friends,

grocers, dentist, gas station attendants,

And utter strangers on the street.

All were delighted recipients of the fragrant blossoms.

I've lived too near New York too long

To understand such practices.

I was asked occasionally to play my violin at local affairs and always obliged, though there was not much time in my busy farm life for keeping up to concert pitch. One spring day while we were hard at tapping in the sugar bush, a delegation came from nearby Londonderry, Vermont, to ask if I would play at an old lady's funeral in Bondville. The woman had said before she died, "I don't want any darned preacher preaching over me, I want Scott Nearing." So, laying down our tools, over the hill we went and helped at the funeral. I played Thais' "Meditation" and Scott spoke eloquently for the old lady we had never met. After the service some people came up and asked Scott if he did this professionally and if others could avail themselves of his services. One man was heard to say in a loud voice: "When I die, I want Helen to play at my funeral and I want Scott to speak."

Our eschewing of modern-day pleasures like the radio was considered eccentric. Scott never did learn to tolerate the intrusion of the radio into his life. He not only looked on it as trivial, trashy, and inconsequential, with news at best only in headlines, but there was no escape from its noise, which sounds now in corridors, in elevators, in shops, in banks, in airports, and in most homes.

The young Nearing and Knothe families had grown up in a comparatively noiseless era, with few motorcars, little traffic and no din, and no radio with its constant background of music or talk. We were lucky to have been from before the Age of Noise. Evenings were quiet, daytimes, too. No morning news trumpeted; one waited for the daily paper or weekly or monthly magazine to read in peace.

Quietude was close to Thoreau. The incessant rowdy radios would have maddened him and driven him from society altogether.

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