Suburban Soliloquies #8
~SEXTANT~
It was an effort finding a sufficiently detailed
map. In my imitation of real navigation, I bent
over unrolled charts, drawing lines and calculating
measurements to figure exactly where my house is
fixed to the globe. Stick a pin at 40° 09'
16" North by 74° 52' 40" West and my roof
should leak.That's dead reckoning, after taking into
account the negligible distance this house might have
drifted in the forty-five years since it was built
and the map was printed. I don't swear to the
accuracy of my numbers, as I found differences
between maps.
To be sure, it would be better to use your blunt
finger to point out the spot. The swirling ridges of
your finger would then leave a print on the map that
would form a reasonable facsimile of how streets are
arranged here in Levittown, Pennsylvania. Mr.
Levitt made history by creating a planned community
on a scale this country had not seen since French
architect Pierre L'Enfant plotted Washington, D.C. We
invent our habitat. We attempt to draw stable maps
across fluid space, trying to trap chaos beneath a
grid.
It is to Mr. Levitt's credit that he permanently
altered the future of suburban design. The
curling streets and landscaping helped to defy
monotony. These are all single-family homes
occupying eight square miles of the original 5,750
acres that Levitt purchased. The rest are
parks, pools, shopping centers, schools, libraries,
churches, and the like; all the necessities for a
self-contained city, although Levittown is not
properly a city. It is divided up among three
townships and a borough that didn't want to give up
their tax bases. It had at one time been prime
farmland, and before that woodland. Farewell
topsoil and biodiversity. According to the
estimates of biologists, the world can only support
one or two billion people at this pleasant level of
subsistence. I should like to see this level of
subsistence available to everyone, although it would
first mean reducing the number of everyone.
Our unique accomplishment as a species has been to
reface the earth with the invention of agriculture
and mining. It left large wads of humanity free from
having to labour directly for their sustenance. These
unemployed had to divert the capabilities of their
brains, the human's instrument of survival, to invent
new vocations. This was a more thorough exercise of
creativity than ever the farmer had time for.
Non-farming bums had to get the farmers to part with
their excess food. Culture was born of this luxury
and some of those newly invented professions were
priests, police, painters, and poets; and who's to
say which is the proverbial oldest profession.
Culture remains a word stolen from farming.
Love is also a luxury born of culture. At the
root of its function is the need to keep humans
together long enough to procreate and prepare another
generation to take over. Love is a luxury not
adequately understood by most of the human species. I
have not been able to define love to my own
satisfaction, but I can recognize the manifestation
of love. The manifestation of love is sacrifice. By
this I do not mean the hapless romantics who hold
themselves emotional hostage until another loves
them. It is ludicrous to make someone love you, or,
when they no longer love you, to demand they forsake
their happiness and remain with you. This is
self-centeredness. This is putting your own happiness
and importance before another and there can be no
love where there is no compassion. Although
many people, in order to feel they are whole, require
a relationship, this also is not love. I am
trying to plot the coordinates of love, to be able to
define it by its boundaries.
Add to those coordinates given in the first paragraph
the additional coordinate of time; it is the start of
Summer in the year of 1998. Enclosed therein is
the moment of our romance. I am continually
mapping our relationship and never taking it for
granted. Neither of us would dare to travel
into the cruel regions where our love would be
lost. I doubt my spouse is capable of the
crimes that would prevent me from loving her.
And every day I work to earn her affection. In
this tiny space and brief time that cannot last, she
is my greatest happiness and foremost priority.
It feels like more happiness than I am entitled to.
|