I did it again last weekend. I got away from the city. It was a veritable escape, the dodge of the outlaw, the breakout from the jailhouse, The Great Escape. The city as prison is not too fanciful a comparison. We have our tight schedules, and we are supervised hourly, if not by a guard, at least by a clock or a wristwatch. Yes, we do eat and live better (but not all of us); however, I am informed by books that Victorian prisons afforded the same comforts to prisoners of means and denied them to prisoners without means. He must have been a desperate villein to have invoked the medieval formula ‘Staatluft macht frei’ (city air makes a man free).
The fact that the calendar was a product of urbanisation pretty much says it all. There, on a piece of papyrus, was the year in notches and compartments. Inasmuch as the future was secure was man less free. I cannot help lapsing into a sublimation of barbarism at times; it is the civilised man’s prerogative. One cannot help feeling that there must have been greater camaraderie in hunting and gathering bands than in sedentary society. When the future was unknown, one knew one’s neighbours better. One had to. And when the hunt was shared out equally, what room was there for envy or jealousy? And when the whole world was our garden, what use was a lawnmower? One can appreciate why a man of such exquisite sensitivity as Gauguin should have wandered off to Tahiti, displaying to civilization an ample derriere. And he wasn’t the only one to make the trek; close on his heels followed D.H.Lawrence from that most civilised nation of them all, the one that invented the fork. Like Dr.Livingstone, each was on a spiritual pilgrimage. Each was getting away in search of his self, lost at the time of the first calendar.
And yet it was the very calendar which dictated that I leave in the middle of the month. Why? To see Luna in all her naked glory! No, there’s no need to bowdlerise the line; but anyone who has made a tryst with the moon will know the seductive attraction of her spell. He will appreciate why the waters wish to desert the earth for her. Yes, I had a meeting with her. Somewhere near Netrokona, I peered at her through a pair of binoculars, and was born again. But wasn’t it very civilised of me, to use an instrument to see the moon? Isn’t the whole idea to look at her as the first man did? Not quite.
I cannot in all conscience deny that there are ten thousand years of civilisation behind me. I am not proud of the fact, but I am aware of the fact. I doubt if civilisation has been good for humanity as a whole, but I have no doubt that it’s been excellent for parts thereof. So, out there, beneath the rain-tree and the acacias, I was literally thanking my lucky stars that I belonged to the latter part. And on this particular trip I had even taken a map of the moon! Just as the atlas had predicted, there were the dark and the bright areas. The former had been labeled by cartographers’ fancy variously ‘Oceanus Procellarum’, ‘Mare Imbrium’, ‘Mare Serenitatis’, ‘Mare Tranquillitatits’. And it sent a shiver to learn that the first man had set foot in the Sea of Tranquillity.
You cannot get away from civilisation, but you can get away from the city. You can spend elongated hours studying the arc of the gliding kite or the gravity-defying vertical climb of the woodpecker. And since modern man loathes waste, the idle binocular was trained on the full moon at night. And, of course, there was the necklace of stars. Intriguing how many more you can see where there are no sodium lamps competing with the filaments of the firmament. The Edisonian interruption absent, the true planetarium bared its depths to the ravished vision. And when the pond wiggled its green fingers on a sultry afternoon, there was no resistance offered to the temptation. I dived in. Getting one’s bath-water from a pipe may be efficient, but the contact with the element is so minimised as to render it an experience in spiritual economy. And for all the thoroughness with which one is cleansed externally, the accumulated internal dross can only be sloughed off in natural water.
Of course, the whole nation has its roots in the country. Citizens hurrying home before the holidays apparently run to their families but in reality to where nature intended them to be. We are not an urban nation; that we are correspondingly less urbane than other nations is right now beside the point. It is also beside the point that rural life is infinitely less beatific than a painting by Constable. The point is that no one in this country is at home in the city. Everyone seems to live in the city with half his personality. One half longs to get away to the country, the other to the city. We are a restless nation. We have not quite found the centre of our national gravity, and, like a man blindfolded, fail to walk a straight line. Some day we shall graduate out - or into? - the country club. Then only will we learn to love that retreat, that escape, into isolation and our primeval past.
We shall then call a prison a prison and not a city just because we happen to huddle there en masse. When we have drawn neat boundaries between work and leisure, that is to say, when we shall begin to put more into the first that we may put more into the latter,
then we shall learn to nourish the self and not just indulge it with unhygienic pastimes, such as watching TV and gossiping. Of course, by then we shall be creating the suburb, that ultra-modern outpost of civilisation. Nothing so highlights my earlier point that civilization has definitely benefited the few as the suburb. The lack of suburbs testifies to our rural roots; their presence will signify a permanent getting away from the less fortunate to the more fortunate. But would that be getting away, or giving away our hearts?
