( 1 ) Pascal went on to suggest that an inability to rest can be blamed for everything from wanderlust to war: “A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town.”
Village PeopleWhy is it so difficult to cultivate community?
Village PeopleWhy is it so difficult to cultivate community?
The traveler’s holy grail is a bar or restaurant frequented solely by locals. You know the place: the furniture mismatched, the radio on, there’s at least one person reading a newspaper; there’s a warmth, as well as a subtle guarantee of quality, that emanates from a place where everyone seems to know one another.
Such a close-knit way of life centered in a local community might be termed the “village mentality.” Marked by a shared focus on the immediate locality, and the people who inhabit it, it’s a mindset that can be cultivated in the neighborhoods of a city as well as in small towns and villages. Friendships are made, and maintained, within the community, growing organically from regular encounters; people come to see their home as the area itself, rather than just their house or apartment, and so life is lived more openly.
Encountered as a stranger, a community like this can feel like a low-key utopia, but establishing something similar back home can be a challenge. A village does not germinate overnight; it can take years, decades or generations, and the day-to-day reality might not be as straightforwardly delightful as what you experience when away from home. Always seeing the same faces can become tiresome—the old man reading a newspaper is picturesque on first encounter, but perhaps not when you see him every day and discover the topics that set him off.
Is it any wonder that so many of us, after a busy week of work, opt for a change of scene, as often as we can, rather than stay put and build the kind of community that we find so appealing elsewhere? The 17th-century French thinker Blaise Pascal suggested that this was down to humankind’s “secret instinct which impels them to seek amusement and occupation abroad.”1 Alongside this urge, Pascal wrote, stood a contradictory pillar of self-knowledge: “That happiness in reality consists only of rest, and not in stir.” In the case of the village mentality the contradiction is evident: We want the deep peace of belonging, but our itchy feet undermine our ability to put in the hours.
