The Virtues of a Farm

For the young people a farm is a kind of Paradise. One never hears the whine of the city child, "Mama, what shall I do now?" On a farm no day is ever long enough for the young person to crowd into its meager twenty-four hours all there is to be done. That, too, is true of the good farmer himself. No day is long enough. There is fishing and swimming, explorations of the woods and the caves, trapping, messing about the big tractors, playing in the great mows, a hundred exciting things to do which each day are new and each day adventurous.

But most of all there is the earth and the animals through which one comes very close to eternity and to the secrets of the universe. Out of Gus, the Mallard duck, who comes up from the pond every evening to eat with the dogs, out of Stinker, the bull[dog], with his wise eyes and placid disposition, out of all the dogs which run ahead leaping and barking and luring the small boys farther an farther into the fields, a child learns much, and most of all the warmth and love of Nature which is perhaps the greatest of all resources, not only because its variety and beauty is inexhaustible but because slowly it creates a sense of balance and of values, of philosophy and even of wise resignation to man's own significance which bring the great rewards of wisdom and understanding and tolerance. It is not by senseless accident that the vast majority of the great men and women of the nation and those who have built it have come from farms or hamlets. . . .

The good farmer, working with Nature rather than fighting or trying to outwit her, may have what he wants of those treasures which are the only real ones and the ones by which man lives—his family, his power to create and construct the understanding of his relationship to the universe, and the deep, religious, humble sense of his own insignificance in God's creation.

With appreciation (and only slight theological quibbles) from Louis Bromfield's Out of the Earth (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1950, pp. 297-299).