Strange Things About City Life Essay

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The differences between urbanites and country people are an old story in literature and commentary. Shakespeare often has a country bumpkin for audiences to laugh at in his plays. Children of all countries are told a bedtime story about the country mouse who comes to visit the city mouse. Common sayings often remind us of the ironies of life by contrasting rural and urban origins. It has been said in many languages that the eager country boy comes to the city to have a brilliant career for the express purpose of buying a nice house in the country in which to retire. In the two essays to be discussed in the following the authors contrast urban and rural life. Henry Fairlie (1924-1990) is British and writes in a manner that is often tongue- in- cheek to point to some of the amusing thing about the way that people take to city life. Underlying Fairlie s humor, however, is a longing for a vanished world in which there were sharp differences between city and country. Charles Creekmore (b.1945) brings a younger and much more American perspective to the same discussion. Where Fairlie appears to despair of the future of the human race which is jammed together into cities, Creekmore defends city life saying that it has more to offer and can bring out the best in people. Underneath the surface differences between Fairlie and Creekmore as they view the urbanite, however, is a single purpose which is to use the opposed realities of urban/rural life to make some interesting points about the nature of human beings.

In his The Idiocy of Urban Life Henry Fairlie puts together a long list of what is silly, humiliating, and even dangerous about life in the city. He begins with some sarcastic observations about the fact that the only truly civilized creatures in the city are the rats who come out at 4 AM and lick their paws after a night of eating garbage. After these inhabitants of the city go to bed, Fairlie says: the two legged inhabitants of the city begin to stir and it is they not the rats, who bring the rat race (527). Then Fairlie proceeds to point to the most obvious paradox of rural/urban realities which is that of suburban life: The lunacy of modern life lies in the fact that most city dwellers who can do so try to live outside the city boundaries (527). Fairlie finds it quite amusing that the masses of people who want to work in the city also want to stream out of the city at the end of the work day. He looks back with longing on a time when the captains of industry had their large mansions on the hill to look down on their factories and their workers too.

Now people want the excitement and high pay of the city during the daytime and the calm and quiet of the country at night, Fairlie says. The only problem this gets them into is that everybody wants this at the same time and the result is the traffic jam. Some people spend large parts of...

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