Editor Glass was hopeful that I'd turn up a fair number of
electronic, fulltext versions of works
recommended in the short lists of recommended readings.
Alas, this hope remains unfulfilled (as
yet).
The miracle, however, is that I discovered a fulltext version of E.M. Forster's Howards End, a
wonderful work whose central concern with the very dimensions of rural existence I try to
expound in this article has (naturally) gone unremarked by others concerned with rural education.
I say "naturally," not from any rancor or hubris, but because, as Wendell Berry observes,
literature is no longer regarded by us UnitedStatesians as capable of teaching us anything.
Anyhow, Aimee and I used a quotation from this remarkable work as the text for our 1996
Christmas card (see right). It goes like this:
"London was but a foretaste of this monadic civilization which is altering human nature so
profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before.
Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and
meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised
on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task."
With a little luck, I'll find some time to download this favorite work and do some electronic
digging on the words "rural" and "cosmopolitan." Forster's motto for this work is "only
connect." My essay is about making connections. By the way, you will get little of this rustic
meaning from the nonetheless enjoyable film version of Howards End.
If you think all of this is romantic claptrap, if you can not see trees (or sand, or prairie grasses, or
any bit of earth or sea) from where you sit, you may not have gotten the point yet. Press on; the
issues themselves are sure to press on.
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