Cabin_ Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine - Lou Ureneck [39]
In the essay, “Politics and Conscience,” Havel remembers a disturbing sight from his boyhood, of a factory smokestack polluting the sky:
Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens. I have no idea whether there was something like a science of ecology in those days; if there was, I certainly knew nothing of it. Still that “soiling of the heavens” offended me spontaneously. It seemed to me that, in it, humans are guilty of something, that they destroy something important, arbitrarily disrupting the natural order of things, and that such things cannot go unpunished. To be sure, my revulsion was largely aesthetic; I knew nothing then of the noxious emissions which would one day devastate our forests, exterminate game, and endanger the health of people.
Havel speculates that a medieval peasant would have had the same reaction as he, a boy—a shared intuition of something terribly wrong, of some natural, higher law being violated.
What is it, actually, that the world of the medieval peasant and that of a small boy have in common? Something substantive, I think. Both the boy and the peasant are far more intensely rooted in what some philosophers call “the natural world,” or Lebenswelt , than most modern adults. They have not yet grown alienated from the world of their actual personal experience, the world which has its morning and its evening, its down (the earth) and its up (the heavens), where the sun rises daily in the east, traverses the sky and sets in the west, and where concepts like “at home” and “in foreign parts,” good and evil, beauty and ugliness, near and far, duty and rights, still mean something living and definite. They are still rooted in a world which knows the dividing line between all that is intimately familiar and appropriately a subject of our concern, and that which lies beyond its horizon, that before which we should bow down humbly because of the mystery about it.
Few boys now are trappers, and most of us live in cities. Technology has separated us from farms, fields and woods. So the question that nags me is this: Has the departure of nature from our lives impaired our ability to make moral decisions? And by extension, does this account for the way we treat the earth?
CHAPTER 4
FOUNDATION
Our immediate objective on the hillside was sixteen holes, five feet deep and eighteen inches across. Into each hole, we would place a heavy-duty cardboard tube twelve inches in diameter, then surround it with dirt to ground level before filling it with wet concrete to the grade of the cabin. The concrete would dry into hard permanent piers that would reach below the frost line of the hillside’s soil. Such was the plan to create the foundation.
It was a marvelous conception, so easily executed in the abstract.
I rented a small backhoe from a tool and equipment store outside of Portland the night before the work was to begin, and we drove up to the cabin with it on a trailer behind Paul’s truck. We spent the night at a nearby inn that was a vestige of the old ski area—a long articulated building with two levels of simple and inexpensive rooms and a center lodgelike space at the knuckle with a big fireplace. We wanted to get an early start. Our room had a kitchenette, Murphy bed and pullout couch. Paul crashed on the couch without pulling out its bed, the back of his head resting against one arm of the couch and his legs slung over the other arm. He had always been able to sleep anywhere with ease. I remember him once as a teenager, after a three-day disappearance, putting down an unbroken thirty-six-hour sleep on the living room carpet. My brother was no insomniac. I asked him if he wanted to share the Murphy