Suburbia.

I spent the first thirty years of my life living in the English suburbs. It’s where most of the English spend the whole of their lives. And then I moved to a cottage – a modest, semi-detached cottage, but a cottage nonetheless – in the country. What a revelation.

In the suburbs, nature is tagged on in bits and pieces to an environment of inert brick, steel, glass, concrete and tarmac. It’s also carefully placed to be tidy without being intrusive. In the country it’s the other way round. The environment is, if not entirely natural in the strictest sense of the word, at least still subject to natural forces. It’s the buildings that are tagged on.

I started noticing things – like how big the sky is, which direction the wind is coming from, how the seasons shape the production of crops and wild plants. I’d never known before that fruit bushes like elder and blackberry have flowers in the spring, and when they fall off in the summer the fruit starts to grow in the same place. Where had I been all my life? And I discovered that the seasons make their presence felt more strongly in the country. Summers are cleaner, winters colder, springs more vibrant and autumns more melancholy. I knew then that I never wanted to move back to the suburbs.

At first my reasons were purely environmental. I developed an increasing level of distaste for the manicured nature of the suburbs. The matching houses, the scrubbed pavements, the tidy gardens and the neat rows of cherry trees seemed simply characterless. Some of the older ones had a charm of sorts, but that was about it. There was no richness and no cutting edge. As I grew older, however, I realised there was something else.

The suburbs have become the model of domestic ubiquity in most parts of the developed world. Little boxes on a hillside. They are the homeland of Middle England, Middle America, and Middle everywhere else. And they are one of the primary mechanisms by which we are controlled by whoever is controlling us. It isn’t so much the suburbs themselves that are the problem, but the mentality they engender. The suburban mentality has surely become the dominant force driving the predominant mass of western populations.

I would suggest that the suburban mindset is more about belonging than living. It’s about tidiness, control and surface comfort. It’s about walking carefully between the tramlines with everybody else. It’s about reviling anybody who dares to be different, and mocking anybody who argues for a different way of seeing things. In short, it’s about the fear of not being part of the crowd. And that’s exactly where the system wants us. Rule by fear is still the major method of control, just as it was in the days of the Roman Republic.

I came across these words from Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet today. They’re part of his homily on houses.

And tell me, people of Orphalese, what have you in these houses? And what is it you guard with fastened doors?
Have you peace, the quiet urge that reveals your power?
Have you remembrances, the glimmering arches that span the summits of the mind?
Have you beauty, that leads the heart from things fashioned of wood and stone in the holy mountain?
Tell me, have you these in your houses?
Or have you only comfort, and the lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house as guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master?

Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral.

For that which is boundless in you abides in the mansion of the sky, whose door is the morning mist, and whose windows are the songs and the silences of night.

I think we’re going roughly in the same direction.