Landscape with Woman and Child, Albert Pinkham Ryder

ALAN writes:

In “Life in a Lighthouse” (Sept. 20), you wrote “often the very best life is one that is somewhat deprived….”

My father would certainly testify to that, and so would many of his contemporaries. It was always his firm judgment that children were better off by far who grew up with too little than with too much. He would look upon a nationwide culture of people who are drunk on material excess, toys, and amusements as vindication for that judgment. And he would be right.

People who wrote about growing up in the 1920s-‘30s often said that their families were poor but happy.

“….These were happy days in our lives at that time.  …I have never forgotten those wonderful years…  To me, the neighborhood was very safe.  We were all poor people but happy….”, a woman wrote at age 87 about growing up in St. Louis in the 1920s.

St. Louisan Lois Kendall wrote about her childhood in the 1950s:

“When I was growing up, we never had a lot of money….   As little girls, a big Saturday treat for (sister) Myra and me was walking to Cherokee Street with mother and Auntie Vi.  Mostly we just looked at the wonderful wares that beckoned from the colorful counters at Woolworth’s and Kresge’s, making mental wish lists of all we’d buy if we had $100….  I don’t remember ever feeling deprived because I couldn’t actually buy those things.  Looking and wishing was really quite enough….”  [Lois Kendall, “The simple life is sweet”, South Side Journal, Oct. 27, 1996 ]

Joanna Francis, a woman in England, prefers life as it was in 1939 over what it is today.  She is quite comfortable with the way the English people lived then and has no yen for modern toys and excess.  [See “Desperately seeking wartime husband for woman who lives like it’s permanently 1939 “]

Of course many people today would look upon her as a freak—the proper response to which would be:  “Look who’s talking.”

When Chinese author Liu Zongren spent two years in the United States, he often felt as if he were on another planet. “I never really got used to life there,” he wrote afterward. He was not favorably impressed by Americans’ excess, aggressiveness, TV advertising, or jogging.  Among the friends he made in America, “few were able to understand why I preferred to live a poorer, simpler life in China.”  [“Author from China Visiting United States Says He Felt Like E.T.”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 6, 1985 ]

I was half the age I am now when I read that article and saved it.  It seemed to me that Mr. Zongren had some very sensible things to say about Americans’ passion for hype and excess.

We live in what surely must be one of the most degenerate eras in history, when children are immersed in hype and excess. Fortunately my parents were an exception to that trend. Without my fully realizing it when I was a boy, they made me wealthy: I could see, hear, walk, talk, play, read, write, think, laugh, cry, and dream. Of course that was a kind of wealth I neither understood nor appreciated in those years.  Most children today might be able to enjoy that same kind of wealth if their not-so-wiser elders did not insist on doing good to them with limitless toys, games, gadgets, whims, and amusements.

“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone,” said Thoreau. Indeed. For me, that includes 90% of modern “culture.” And “life in a lighthouse” as it was decades ago now seems in many ways to be just about right.

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