Urbanites have been talking about quitting the rat race for three thousand years
Mostly it’s just talk
This week, former journalist Noelle Hancock published a follow up to a viral article she wrote for Cosmopolitan. The original piece, published last year, explained why Hancock had left her high-salary job as a writer In New York to move to the Virgin Islands, where she is content scooping ice cream for $10 an hour.
Hancock recalled the barrage of hostile responses her article provoked. Commenters called her a “brat” and a “trust fund bitch.” Manifestos of this sort come and go in a given year — the family who crowdfunds their move off the grid, the PR employee who ditches Dubai to live in low-tech desert community. Reactions to these stories are at once polarizing and predictable. After all, we’re talking about an idea that is thousands of years old.
It is one of the earliest thoughts to occur to the Western mind: Is civilization really worth the hassle? For all its convenience and possibility, civil society is stressful, tiresome, lonely, filled with responsibility and the unpleasantness of a million egos trying to get ahead. Wouldn’t it be nice to, well … leave?
The pastoral genre (or mode, depending on who you ask) is propelled by the fancy of a better existence, a paradise to be regained somewhere beyond the dizzying horizons of politics, commerce, and technology. As early as 700 BC we find Hesiod, an ancient Greek at the time of Homer, condemning the corrupt professions of judges and money-lenders, while praising the honest pursuits of husbandry and agriculture. Centuries later, circa 30 BC, Virgil would keep Hesiod in mind when writing his Georgics — a series of pastoral poems invoking the former glory of Italian idyllic life, in the days before its farmers were forced to fight in Caesar’s civil wars.
For most readers of pastoral works through history, the promise they contained of a better life was more of a diversion than a call to action. It remains much the same today. For every person who ditches her corporate job to scoop ice cream, there’s a thousand harried workers who mentally comfort themselves with scenes of a farm or country house, where they envision living a more honest and fulfilling life. Someday.
People have been enjoying such idle thoughts for centuries. In 16th century England, a royal courtier might find delight in one of Edmund Spenser’s pastoral pieces. The courtier would appreciate how much simpler than his own life a rustic shepherd’s was, free from the flattery, deceit, corruption, and swarming self-interest of his world. Shakespeare, in his comedy As You Like It, satirized the flourishing pastoral genre of his time, preferring instead a balance between the virtues of the city and the country. But not even Shakespeare could deaden the appeal of the bucolic tale. The courtier of the Elizabethan era would have numerous counterparts, including the middle class Englishman of the twentieth century. This modern chap might delight in the hobbits of Tolkien’s Shire, who evoke memories of a merry and idyllic British past, now contaminated by industry and the ravages of two World Wars.
With the Renaissance, thinkers reapplied a topic usually summoned alongside lutes and shepherds, to pose serious questions about how people should act and behave. If the business of agrarian land-ownership, early republics, or the courts of kings had fatigued generations before, think of how urgent the question of essential living would appear in the age of international trade, machinery, and mass communication. These writers proposed not only that the bucolic, simple life was less stressful; it was nobler and better for the human spirit.
Michel de Montaigne wrote in his essay “On Cannibals” that Brazilian natives lived in “such a state of purity that it sometimes saddens me that we did not learn of them sooner;” they were, to him, an admirable people to whom the words for “lying, treason, deceit, greed, envy, slander” are not known. A century and a half later, Jean Jacques Rousseau would formulate his idea about humanity’s fall from grace, occurring when the species traded the natural goodness of the tribe for the hostile, self-serving machinations of society. He believed that this early stage retained “the best in man,” and in his novel, Émile, he proposed a method of education to preserve these admirable, though systematically undermined, virtues.
Where Montaigne and Rousseau were armchair thinkers, there was one philosopher who practiced what he preached. (Well, at least for a time.) Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, begins after the author ditched his job (in this case, his post at the family’s pencil-making business), to live simply and deliberately in the semi-wilderness of Massachusetts. The book, whatever its imperfections, is an eloquent reflection on what is to be gained from a pared-down existence, a sabbatical from civilization, and the compromises of society.
Even we average citizens are guided by pastoral tastes in subtle, unconscious ways. In a documentary, public intellectual Alain de Botton proposes that the way we make our homes in the West is indebted to the ideal of the country cottage. Styles of domestic architecture are often pastiche and imitation (mock-Tudor, colonial townhouse), belying an anxiety about a modern world whose complexities and formalities confuse us. So much the better to build a cozy, sentimental home, similar in appearance and purpose to its predecessor of two hundred years ago. In this way, de Botton says, modern homeowners extend the tradition of the Queen’s Hamlet, the peasant-playground Marie Antoinette constructed on the grounds of Versailles. There is always something seductive about little pocket of fixed comfort in a perplexing, ever-changing world.
Some have criticized Noelle Hancock for being naive. Others see her choice to move to where it is more simple and arcadian as condescending to the many people who toil and live in the developing world. In light of this, it is wise to return to Shakespeare, who saw there were virtues to be gained from life in both the pastures and the palaces. When we are in a city too long, it can be easy to see nothing but the concerns of humans — of jobs, money, status, ambition, romance. It can be salutary to spend time in nature, which reminds us that neither worms nor eagles care about our new promotion.
