I can't hear myself think." After a visit to New York we feel that
its inhabitants are so deafened by the constant blare of confusion that
they can't feel themselves live. The steady sufferers from this complaint
do not realize their condition. They find it on the whole less trouble
_not_ to feel themselves live, and they are most uneasy when chance forces
them to spend a few days (on shipboard, for instance) where they are not
protected by ceaseless and aimless activity from the consciousness that
they are themselves. They cannot even conceive the bitter-sweet, vital
taste of that consciousness as we villagers have it, and they cannot
understand how arid their existence seems to us without this unhurried,
penetrating realization of their own existence and of the meaning of their
acts. We do not blame city dwellers for not having it; we ourselves lose
it when we venture into their maelstrom. Like them, we become dwarfed by
overwhelming numbers, and shriveled by the incapacity to "sense" the
humanity of the countless human simulacra about us. But we do not stay
where we cannot feel ourselves live. We hurry back to the shadow of
Hemlock Mountain, feeling that to love life one does not need to be what
Is usually called happy, one needs only to live.

It cannot be, of course, that we are the only community to discover this
patent fact; but we know no more of the others than they of us. All that
we hear from that part of America which is not Hillsboro is the wild yell
of excitement going up from the great cities, where people seem to be
doing everything that was ever done or thought of except just living. City
dwellers make money, make reputations (good and bad), make museums and
subways, make charitable institutions, make with a hysteric rapidity, like
excited spiders, more and yet more complications in the mazy labyrinths of
their lives, but they never make each others' acquaintances ... and that
is all that is worth doing in the world.

We who live in Hillsboro know that they are to be pitied, not blamed, for
this fatal omission. We realize that only in Hillsboro and places like it
can one have "deep, full life and contact with the vitalizing stream of
humanity." We know that in the very nature of humanity the city is a small
and narrow world, the village a great and wide one, and that the utmost
efforts of city dwellers will not avail to break the bars of the prison
where they are shut in, each with his own kind. They ma