“A town is not land, nor even landscape. A town is
people living on the land. And whether it will survive or perish depends not on
the land but on the people; it depends on what the people think they are….If
they think of themselves as living a good and useful and satisfying life, if
they put their lives first and the real estate business after, then there is
nothing inevitable about the spreading ruin of the countryside.’’—Pulitzer
Prize-winning American poet, playwright and statesman Archibald MacLeish
(1892-1982), “A Lay Sermon for the Hill Towns,” originally printed in
Riders
on the Earth: Essays and Recollections (1978), reprinted in The Pioneer Valley Reader: Prose and Poetry From New England’s Heartland,
edited by James C. O’Connell (1995)
(The image accompanying this post shows a covered
bridge in Arlington, VT, within a short walking distance of the onetime home of
Norman Rockwell, who chronicled small-town New England life visually, as
Archibald MacLeish attempted to do in poems and prose like this excerpt.)
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