There's something to be said for disorganization and wildness. There's nothing more soulless than a pine-tree plantation, with trees rising from the level earth at exactly the same height, at exactly the same circumference, evenly spaced in neat little rows. Unless, of course, it's a suburban subdivision. These housing developments with their giant houses, all of the same style, laid out on carefully planned lanes with their tidy little yards devoid of character or individuality, where natural landscaping and fruit trees are banned, cannot be called a neighborhood or community anymore than that stand of pine trees can be called a forest. They satisfy that strange human need for order and control, but they no longer possess any of the natural beauty of a ragged-edged wild forest or an unplanned community that developed character from a being built gradually by a variety of builders over a variety of decades.
Of course organization and order have their place, in the business world, for instance. I'd like my accountant to be an organized and orderly person, but his personality is as likely to be as bland as his tidy desk. A messy desk may be the sign of a messy brain, but the messy brains create beauty, while the orderly minds create math. Both are needed, but math is boring.
If God is real, I think he cries just a bit every time man takes another step closer to the complete geometrification of the world, like the weeping Indian at the sight of lousy litterers ruining his ancestral land. The world is supposed to be a random place where things happen without purpose or a reason other than that they happened. Can't we just leave a tad of it the pointless, wild way it was before we starting turning it into a living Piet Mondrian painting?
4 comments:
A neighborhood is made up of people, not buildings.
I've never exactly seen much life in most subdivisions.
You know, Chris is a mathalete, but his desk is way messier than mine. And though I'm not the most creative person in the world, I'm pretty creative. So, I don't think the stereotypes always hold true.
But as long as there are trees in the neighborhood, I say BRAVO! I hate seeing these new subdivisions with no trees. There were trees there before, but they felt the need to tear them all down instead of leaving a few. It's a bad idea for the environment and it's economically bad for the homeowners.
Meaghan: There's always exceptions. I was really just using the logical thinker stereotype as a more humorous example. I know there are plenty of kooky accountants, although stereotypes aren't usually stereotypes for nothing.
I was really kind of just talking about an over-emphasis of order and control over creativity and wildness. You see it in schools where math is pushed much more intensively than the fine arts and literature and you see it where I live where it seems like over half of the woods spaces are planted in straight rows with no undergrowth.
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