'"A Harbor of Refuge'" VL the Good

[public domain]

"And as the moon rose higher and higher the
inessential houses began to melt away until gradually
I became aware of the old island here that flowered
once for Dutch sailors' eyes - a fresh, green breast
of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that
had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in
whispers to the last and
greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory
enchanted moment man must have held
his breath in the presence of this continent,
compelled into an aesthetic contemplation
he neither understood nor desired, face to face for
the last time in history with
something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby


"The Pastoral idea has been used to define the meaning
of America ever since the
age of discovery, and it has not yet lost its hold
upon the native imagination. The
ruling motive of the good shepard, leading figure of
the classic, Virgilian mode, was to
withdraw from the great world and begin a new life in
a fresh, green landscape. And
now here was a virgin continent! Inevitably the
European mind was dazzled by this
prospect. With an unspoiled hemisphere in view it
seemed that mankind actually
might realize what had been thought a poetic fantasy.
Soon the dream of a retreat to
an oasis of harmony and joy was removed from its
traditional literary context. It was
embodied in various utopian schemes for making America
the site of a new beginning
for Western society."

"There can be little doubt that it (the pastoral
ideal) affects the nation's taste in
serious literature, reinforcing the legitimate respect
enjoyed by such writers as Mark
Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Frost. But on the
lower plane of our
collective fantasy life the power of this sentiment is
even more obvious. The mass
media cater to a mawkish taste for retreat into
primitive or rural felicity exemplified
by TV westerns and Norman Rockwell magazine covers."


Pastoralism was "generated by an urge to withdraw from
civilization's growing
power and complexity. What is attractive in
pastoralism is the felicity represented by
an image of a natural landscape, a terrain either
unspoiled or, if cultivated rural.
Movement toward such a symbolic landscape also may be
understood as movement
away from an 'artificial' world, a world identified
with 'art,' using this word in its
broadest sense to mean the disciplined habits of mind
or arts developed by organized
communities."

Marx,  The Machine In The Garden: Technology and the
Pastoral Ideal in America


Democratic Ideals and the Urban Experience

Kincaid

http://www.american-philosophy.org/archives/2001%20Conference/Discussion%20papers/Democratic_Ideals_and_the_Urban_Experience.htm






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