ALAN writes:

In an essay about small communities and local culture, Wendell Berry wrote of how it was once common for people in farming communities in Kentucky to visit each other and talk in the evening:

“…They told each other stories, as I knew myself, that they had all heard before. Sometimes they told stories about each other, about themselves, living again in their own memories and thus keeping their memories alive. Among the hearers of these stories were always the children. When bedtime came, the visitors lit their lanterns and went home. My friend talked about this, and thought about it, and then he said, ‘They had everything but money.’

“They were poor, as country people have often been, but they had each other, they had their local economy in which they helped each other, they had each other’s comfort when they needed it, and they had their stories, their history together in that place. To have everything but money is to have much. And most people of the present can only marvel to think of neighbors entertaining themselves for a whole evening without a single imported pleasure and without listening to a single minute of sales talk.

“Most of the descendants of these people….no longer sit in the evenings and talk to anyone. Most of them now sit until bedtime watching TV…. …most of us no longer talk with each other, much less tell each other stories….” [ Emphasis added. ]

[ Quoted from: What Are People For? Essays by Wendell Berry, North Point Press, 1990 pp. 157-58. The essay can also be read online here.]

Late in her life, a woman recalled this memory from growing up in East Texas in the 1920s-‘30s:

“Sometimes in the hot weather, we would set up a bed in the yard. I never did get to sleep on it, but sometimes we sat on it in the evening before bedtime. One of my most pleasant memories is sitting on the bed or on the front porch in the dark—no TV, no radio, just quiet talk.”

( Quoted by her son, English Professor John M. Crisp, in his essay, “Recalling The Early Days of a Very Long Life.”)

I recall the same thing from the 1950s, when my mother, grandparents, aunts and uncles would sit in the back yard or on the screened-in porch at evening twilight and then for an hour or more after dark. My cousin and I were the only children at those moments. There were no distractions – no radio, no TV, just quiet conversation among the grown-ups, punctuated now and then by silence or laughter. One evening in 1957 we sat there and they talked about a strange new thing in the sky called “Sputnik.” At age seven, I had no idea what that was, but it sounded spooky.

And at family sit-down dinners in those years, there were no toys or amusements, just quiet conversation among the grown-ups about family matters. It is one of the things about them that I miss most of all: Their conversation about family, friends, places, or events that lived in their memory but are now gone forever.

Many American parents today are rich enough to give their children a roomful of toys, gadgets, games, and prepackaged music and entertainment. But they are too poor to give them evenings of quiet conversation without those things – poor in imagination, in the ability to understand the priceless value of such evenings, and in character too weak to oppose the zeitgeist of modernism.

Would doing that require “turning the clock back”? Indeed, it would, if we understand that expression as a metaphor for restoring abandoned wisdom. But most modernists are in no danger of doing that. They are too busy with their toys and amusements even to understand the wisdom their grandparents and great-grandparents had without those things.

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