Far Out isn’t Far Enough: Life in the Back of Beyond
In a Paris Review interview, Guy Davenport remarked that “the illustrated text goes back forever. The Victorians wouldn’t buy a book if it didn’t have woodcuts in it. And the same for the Middle Ages, I think—the more pictures the better.”
If that’s the case, then the Victorians would have bought Tomi Ungerer’s book in a heartbeat. Virtually every page in this volume has a lovely illustration to accompany its text, which is based upon a 12-month diary kept by Ungerer, during he and his wife’s return to nature in Nova Scotia, Canada. Apparently, life in New York was already hectic by the 1970s, and the Ungerers were fed up with it. So they moved into a wrecked house near the town of Gull Harbor (population 2000), raised animals and built a barn, among other things. “Yet we never became real farmers,” wrote Ungerer. “I am an artist and earn my income from books and drawings, not from the products of our little enterprise. It was for us a way of collecting new experiences, curiosity about what we had never done before. Besides, it seemed that the only way to exorcise the past life was to start a new one.”
I’ve noticed more books and magazine articles expressing this same sentiment. There is this nostalgia for a simpler time and for a return to farm life. But was farm life really better? Not according to this article in the latest Lapham’s Quarterly. We like to romanticize either the past or the future, but rarely the present. Why is that? Is it such an impossible task?
