Here is a thought for consideration generated by a charactor I'm developing.
There is a marked division between city dweller and country dweller, each developing into a sub-specie of the race, with different life rhythms, expectations and outlook. City dwellers will never be truely happy living in the country and vice-versa.
The extract below sets out my / my characters arguement.
Long ago, he decided against convention that a town was of a size where its edge is visible. Not necessarily visible from a single place, almost any tall building might permit that vantage, but from natural geographic layout. It was an arbitrary, almost perverse definition with the potential for manipulation at will - that being in part the attraction. Simon was uncomfortable with the English definition of ‘a City by Royal Charter’ or because a Cathedral happened to have been constructed centuries before. In his eyes English cities such as Winchester and St Albans, renowned for their Cathedrals and thereby ‘cities’ by construct, were little more than towns, it is within their scale and setting to accord to natures rhythms and cycles. Simon believed cities had to have a scale that modified their environment and the people that chose to live in cities were almost a different species of human; such city dwellers had forgone contact with nature and lost the sense of the seasons. This did not make them any worse or any better, just different. Not for them the joy and spontaneity of finding the first wild raspberry or late season mushrooms; to his mind, cities suppressed nature’s cycle yet pretended to be the very centre of the universe importing a camouflage of sensation and experience in a pastiche of nature.
By Simon’s definition, Bergen, the second most populous urban area in Norway, was no more than a town. He argued that if you can see the surrounding countryside then it is to be in the presence of life’s natural rhythms. Hillsides speckled with the flush of spring leaves and the brightness of the light reflected from the ocean that illuminated the western sky, made plain the boundaries. Even to the blind, the scent of the sun on the pine trees and the sounds and smells of the ocean marked the town’s compliance with nature.
There is a marked division between city dweller and country dweller, each developing into a sub-specie of the race, with different life rhythms, expectations and outlook. City dwellers will never be truely happy living in the country and vice-versa.
The extract below sets out my / my characters arguement.
Long ago, he decided against convention that a town was of a size where its edge is visible. Not necessarily visible from a single place, almost any tall building might permit that vantage, but from natural geographic layout. It was an arbitrary, almost perverse definition with the potential for manipulation at will - that being in part the attraction. Simon was uncomfortable with the English definition of ‘a City by Royal Charter’ or because a Cathedral happened to have been constructed centuries before. In his eyes English cities such as Winchester and St Albans, renowned for their Cathedrals and thereby ‘cities’ by construct, were little more than towns, it is within their scale and setting to accord to natures rhythms and cycles. Simon believed cities had to have a scale that modified their environment and the people that chose to live in cities were almost a different species of human; such city dwellers had forgone contact with nature and lost the sense of the seasons. This did not make them any worse or any better, just different. Not for them the joy and spontaneity of finding the first wild raspberry or late season mushrooms; to his mind, cities suppressed nature’s cycle yet pretended to be the very centre of the universe importing a camouflage of sensation and experience in a pastiche of nature.
By Simon’s definition, Bergen, the second most populous urban area in Norway, was no more than a town. He argued that if you can see the surrounding countryside then it is to be in the presence of life’s natural rhythms. Hillsides speckled with the flush of spring leaves and the brightness of the light reflected from the ocean that illuminated the western sky, made plain the boundaries. Even to the blind, the scent of the sun on the pine trees and the sounds and smells of the ocean marked the town’s compliance with nature.
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