A love like Sam's

Do you love your hometown or region like Samwise Gamgee loved the Shire?

I don't know anyone that does. Oh, I'm sure there are real-world counterparts to Sam Gamgee out there. I always imagine Southerners with that sort of attachment to home. Farmers and rural folk.  Perhaps even a few city-dwellers who love their quirky neighborhood and would not like to see it cave to the urban sameness of the "developers."

But the kind of love that Sam had for the Shire, a core-deep spiritual devotion, a love for the place and its people, that kind of love for place is relatively rare, I think. Sure there are the preservationists, who have a sort of historical interest in saving the old architecture and refurbishing the disused train station, but it's not the same. That is resistance to change, mixed with nostalgia, and overlayed with the hope for tourist dollars if we turn the old warehouse district into a "historic" neighborhood with shops and cafes.

Well, the tempo of change in America makes us all somewhat accepting of the inevitable losses. The cornfield paved over for developments with huge boxy houses tastefully spaced and streets that wind around and come back to where they started. In small towns and rural communities, where change comes more slowly, love for the place itself may have time to grow. But that love comes inevitably into conflict with, well, profit. It is economic ambition after all that drives all that change, and nothing more.

I recently read an odd little book by Hilaire Belloc called The Four Men. I didn't know what to make of it at first, but only when I began to tell a friend about it last night did it occur to me what this book was really about. One might think it was about a place (Sussex) and that wouldn't be wrong. And yet the characters in the book have a seemingly bizarre and almost childish understanding of the place they so love. Their sense of its history is aggrandized, even mythic, and entirely disassociated from any realistic sense of time. The distant past is treated as if it were only yesterday, and great world events are treated as if they centered ultimately on Sussex. Yes, to hear "the four men" talk about it, you'd think Sussex was the capital of the world!

And that's it of course. That's the subject of Belloc's little book: a love for place that is so deeply felt, so all heart, that the place has achieved for them the status of true myth. For the book's narrator most especially, his love of place joyously ignores reason, defies common sense, and pays no obeisance to change.

Alright, I like the book better now that I've figured that out. Now I see its kinship (loosely defined) with Tolkien and Lewis, who saw the danger in all the changes that were coming to England.

Sam Gamgee is my hero.