Driving from my parents’ home to mine takes me from a region known in Thomas Hardy novels as ‘Outer Wessex’ in the extreme west to one that is too far east to appear on his map. This distance which encompasses the entire landscape of 14 novels takes me a mere 2 and a quarter hours. Every time I make the journey I think of Tess Durbeyfield driving a horse-drawn wagon through the night to reach the nearest market town by morning. The comparison is stark: in a modern car the journey is a matter of minutes, and Tess’s eyes would boggle at the idea of travelling all the way across the map without stopping. By any rational reckoning, this change is a remarkable opening of possibilities – a progress of human frontiers for which we must be grateful.
Wendell Berry describes the modern person as a truncated Prodigal, stuck in the wild living of the far distant country and with our return home blocked by norms, expectations, and professional convenience. (Spiritually, of course, our return isn’t blocked: wonderfully, the Father rushes to greet the modern Surrey professional with all the abandon and extravagance he poured out on the 1st century Judaean yeoman.) But in material terms even this bleak picture doesn’t do the situation justice. The distant country, too, is transitory and full of merely shallow relation to place. Apparently my road is known to locals as ‘Jimmy Street’. When I read this fact in a book about local place names (I know, I know), it struck me I’d never heard the name. Most of the people I know here aren’t ‘local’, either. I am not just stuck in the wrong place (that would be easily rectifiable); I cannot see how I could belong in a place at all.
Of course there are communities – religious, professional, social – to which a person can choose to belong, and by God’s grace I know some of that joy here. I am nevertheless haunted by the story in the introduction to David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere of the man known to those in his neighbourhood in East London as ‘the Sherriff’ for the longevity and earnestness of his local influence. Poignantly, his new neighbours don’t know that the street they live on is ‘his’, or even that he has the nickname, much less why. It haunts me because I recognise it: the only people on my street I know by name are either colleagues or immediate neighbours, and I know the latter only very superficially. In long historical perspective this lack of connectedness with and reliance upon the people I live around seems a dangerous and highly novel experiment. I wonder whether the results will vindicate it. Goodhart notices that people who live in this new way have distinctive political beliefs and voting patterns: we are Anywheres, while those who have grown up with a more meaningful connection to a particular place with its particular interests are Somewheres.
When people ask where I’m from (still, interestingly, a stock-in-trade small talk question for modern British Anywheres, despite how little it shapes the way we live our lives), I like to play, foolishly, to Hardy’s Wessex. I’m ‘from Somerset’, I say something about village cricket or hedgerows or real cider, I show that I can do ‘the’ accent. Apart from an idle interest in the fortunes of Bath Rugby and an affection for Butcombe beer, I’ve little claim to use that as an identity marker. There’s no dialect in my home village and few I knew there had a regional accent. Goodhart again: being a graduate of a residential university outside my hometown, I have naturally lost touch with most hometown people. Without realising how or when or that I was choosing this, I’ve become an Anywhere who isn’t from Somerset in any meaningful sense. I happened to grow up in a village full of affluent Anywheres called Monkton Combe, which is near Bath but might just as well have been put next to Cheltenham, or Blandford Forum, or York. Now that I’m one of them, the Anywhere tribe is difficult to escape: my profession and cultural instincts forbid it even if the Somewheres in any possible chosen community did accept me as one of their own.
The Wessex novels are exaggeratedly nostalgic: I assume that Hardy saw little in his Dorchester of milkmaids loading their belongings onto carts on Lady Day, of Skimmington effigies carried by furtive townspeople, or of old women selling ‘furmity’ laced with rum in festival tents. Reading them as a 21st Century nostalgic is like looking at a painting of a painting: if there was a real object there for depiction, its shape is now twice distorted. But Hardy’s nostalgia needn’t invalidate mine. Perhaps what it shows is that a reverence for generational community, and a sense of loss at its absence, is more than a cultural moment for Gen Z or idiosyncratic frustration of mine.
It is idiosyncratic and may be indulgent to have written 900 words mourning this loss when so many have lost so much more. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth thinking about. Connectedness is the price we have collectively paid for mere access. I’m not sure society has benefited from this trade, and I wish we’d kept the receipt. Resistance to the new pattern starts small and may seem futile, but I think I’d like to try.
Yikeiatry 