The Unnamed Road

I walked around The Pastures, a hillside north of our house, musing as follows.

“The earth is poised and serene, showing through its balanced complexities how intelligently creative it is. Human beings are restless. Prejudice is inborn and entirely natural, though aspects of it are ugly. It is beneficial for us to live in accordance with nature, but not in our mean cunning ways, only when we embrace it wholeheartedly.

“I am part of nature. What I have in me is human nature, which has evolved like every species in its own weird and highly specialized way. We have evolved to survive in accord to our environment. Evolutionary adaptation is slow. There isn’t the need for this rapid change, this overheated “development” that plagues the human race, but here it is anyway, no matter how we say what should happen and what should not happen.

“Disasters are part of the pattern of earth’s evolution, which is to say its history. We are the products of disaster. Biological evolution via DNA (whose influence nobody really understands) is actually triggered by disaster to produce something new. Homo Sapiens is a new species, with more evolutionary history than the slug’s, which has stayed serenely unchanged, heedless of its vulnerability to birds and children who like to squash it when it crosses the sidewalk after rain. It does not flee from danger, merely retracts its eye-stalks and feelers. Unlike its cousin the snail, it doesn’t even carry its own portable shelter.

“Human beings have evolved by a long process, quite rapidly compared with the age of the universe. Our intelligence has developed through hardships, and then, what are we? It’s hard to be human, hard to survive: feeble creatures lucky to survive childbirth, and that goes for the mother too.

“I feel we’d be happier as a species if we accepted our lot in life, took a rest from the struggle to make things better, accepted inequality.”

I’m on Telford Way. I recall a time before. How to explain it? Sometimes you have such big thoughts, you cannot really express them. Your consciousness spreads its attention over your entire life in a comprehensive swoop, like an eagle in the mountains with its far-seeing eye. Or if, closer to the ground, you were a bee, it’s as if the entire landscape held sources of nectar, here, there, beyond where the sense organs can reach. Or in your own human terms, as if in a single glace you could gather up all the things you didn’t succeed in doing, the places you never managed to go, the people who rebuffed your attempts at friendship, the people you might have been if you were not restricted to being just one person—all the things that didn’t happen, being beyond the reach of someone with the scars that you bear from long ago: all these are given to you, in an instant of indescribable gratitude.

And what is Telford Way? Nothing special, except for the minor grandeur of its grassy slopes that separate the cheapish houses from the road. They are tall, they seem to slope at 45 degrees, too steep to walk up or down. No child would be tempted to roll down. They are kept mown, though, all except for a house-width swathe, where wild flowers grow among the long grass unchecked. Deliberately, or negligently? Never mind, it looks fine. I’ve stood here and photographed poles with telephone wires radiating in all directions, with a background of blue sky and white-grey fluffy clouds. They meant something to me at the time, I knew not what. Human connectedness below the sky’s majesty?

Let these words of mine remain formless and unpolished. I’ll just go on writing, indefinitely. The moment itself will define my purpose, Nature acting through me sweetly, with scant weeding and pruning.

I’m on an unnamed piece of road now, a concreted section one car wide between the backs of two rows of houses which have no frontage for vehicles. Here they keep their self-made garages, ad-hoc parking spaces and steps through to their back gardens and kitchen doors. As it’s on a hill, one side looks up, the other down. It catches the sun beautifully, so their retaining walls have populated themselves with plants escaped from the gardens: much red valerian, some fruiting shrubs, even a passion-flower vine. There’s nothing spectacular here, nothing to encourage taking snaps, nothing grand. I’d call it a “kept secret” as opposed to a “well-kept secret” which implies effort—and usually precedes someone blabbing the secret to the world.

Every gladdening place I go, I’m still gladder to live at my place. Now I discover why the road is nameless. It comes to a dead end. It’s just a service road for the houses on either side. Specifically what gladdens is the individual designs of their parking spaces, garages, gates, steps. They have creativeness rather than money to spare. Everything is honed down to practical utility, by people proud to own this little patch of Earth. Contrast this with low-rent social housing on other beautiful hillsides in this town: their private yards rampant with weeds, litter, discarded furniture, their fences collapsing. Not immediately gladdening. They could have worked together to make it beautiful but they never do. When the government behaves like a carelessly indulgent parent, the tenants remain stuck in childish irresponsibility, unmerited entitlement. And this is reflected in the difference between our two political parties.

I stop to talk to a black woman walking her dog. She says it is walking her. This is visibly true. She’s far from young, but it gets her out enjoying the sun. I like to see a place like this where nothing is standard or uniform; people make their own spaces. Elsewhere there are disasters, man-made more often than natural. People flee from them when their homes and infrastructure are destroyed. We piously express our concern for them, urge someone to do something. The more we can’t help personally, the more we insist on knowing all the answers and inhabiting the moral high ground. Governments intervene helpfully or otherwise, it’s hard to tell which. As for the rest of us, our opinions are like the bleating of sheep on a hillside, or the cawing of crows wheeling above. Sheep don’t listen to crows, and vice versa.

Democracy can be a dirty business, not just corruption but trivialization of the discourse, so that everyone can have an opinion on everything. So there is disagreement and hate. There might be less hate in Cuba and China, where they don’t have democracy. I don’t know that anybody could deny that there was less hate, misery and evil in Syria before the rebel movements, which demanded democracy. As if democracy is easy. It has taken hundreds of years to evolve, in those places where it works.

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

That was Winston Churchill in a speech to the House of Commons, November 11, 1947.

Anyhow the mess in Syria came about through bad mistakes, I don’t know whose. There is too much oversimplification going on. That’s what I like about Hannah Arendt. She’s not interested in following the crowd, or in oversimplifying everything into soundbites. She makes the enormous effort required. I respect Sam Harris for the same reasons, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali too. I have certain personal objections to each of them, but that’s as it should be. We are not to look for idols who will spare us from thinking our own thoughts. We can engage them on their own terms, to the extent that we feel capable, and let ourselves be counted as “don’t knows” on a vast array of critical topics.

And for Heaven’s sake leave us to our prejudices. They are not to be justified nor refuted. They just are: part of our identity, neither good nor bad. I am not at all suggesting that prejudice should be expressed, promoted or acted upon. It is part of the complexity of being human, and infinitely better than hypocrisy. Let us have our opinions, and avoid hate: do nothing to encourage that. And so our behaviour and speech should be impeccable and always appropriate to the occasion. “Love thy neighbour”; “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”