Writing in his book Landmarks, author Robert Macfarlane makes the following observation about the term parochial:
Over the past century, parochial has soured as a word. The adjective form of parish, it has come to connote sectarianism, insularity, boundedness: a mind or a community turned inward upon itself, a pejorative finitude. It hasn’t always been this way, though. Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67), the great poet of the Irish mundane, was sure of the parish’s importance. For Kavanagh, the parish was not a perimeter but an aperture: a space through which the world could be seen. ‘Parochialism is universal,’ he wrote. ‘It deals with the fundamentals.’ Kavanagh, like Aristotle, was careful not to smudge the ‘universal’ into the ‘general’. The ‘general’, for Aristotle, was the broad, the vague and the undiscerned. The ‘universal’, by contrast, consisted of fine-tuned principles, induced from an intense concentration on the particular. Kavanagh often returned to this connection between the universal and the parochial and to the idea that we learn by scrutiny of the close-at-hand. ‘All great civilisations are based on parochialism,’ he wrote:
To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields—these are as much as a man can fully experience.
Macfarlane is applying this to the writing art. That application caught my attention because in reading his description I realized in my essays that very clear seeing is often what I aim to elicit. I had never thought of it in these terms of the parochial.
But this distinction between two kinds of parochial—perimeter (sectarian turning inward) or aperture (means of viewing well)—can be applied in other ways. On the most basic level our own minds are the first sphere of the parochial, which will either function as an aperture for keen seeing or a perimeter which limits. Moving to the next level—home, or family—is another mode of parochial which will either be our aperture for seeing well, or function as some version of perimeter, obscuring rather than enhancing our sight.
The way we teach our children will help shape the parochial aperture or perimeter of their mind. And the way we build our home will also shape the lens through which they see the world. None of us will see very wide, because we are all very small in a very big word. But we can help our children see with depth from their small place.
My first thought about what Mafarlane is saying comes from my role as a writer. But my last thought comes from my role as a father. Both are something to ponder.