Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, Contesting ‘The Spreading Ruin of the Countryside’)

“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.)

Photo of the Day: The Cliffs of Edgewater, NJ

This photo, which I took this past November, looking east from City Place at The Promenade, captures Edgewater, NJ, at a landscape crossroads. To the upper right are older dwellings, hugging the cliff tops that offer a magnificent vista across the Hudson River; to the left, the newer residences, often high-rise, that have arisen over the past couple of decades, catering to a far more affluent population.

I guess this area means something to me for the most personal of reasons. It wasn’t simply that, over 40 years ago, a long-gone industrial plant employed my father and brothers for a time. But a number of my high school friends, from a similar blue-collar background as mine, lived here.

I am glad that this river town managed to rescue itself when industry left virtually en masse several decades ago. At the same time, I fear that something’s been lost in the reinvention: CNNMoney.com, after all, not too long ago, ranked Edgewater #4 among 10 places in the U.S. where the young and affluent are abundant. How much room is left now for people like my friends and their families?