Scale
I find it idiotic when someones says they want to live in or near New York City in order to have access to an abundance and variety of culture.
I live in an area where Princeton is the cultural center. The township has 30,000 people and the surrounding area-of-orientation has about 150,000. There are more things of personal interest to me on any given day or night than I can possibly do or even keep track of.
Human beings make culture for each other at all scales, even the smallest. Indian tribes of 800 enjoyed much in the way of cultural richness.
From the Foreword (by Kirkpatrick Sale) to the book I’m currently reading, The Breakdown of Nations:
This book needs no introduction in the classic sense — it is clear, straightforward, and quite accessible to any reader — but the [obscure] man who wrote it, such is the way of the world, obviously does.
Leopold Kohr was born in 1909 in the little town of Oberndorf, in central Austria, a village of 2,000 people or so, famous until then only for being the place where “Silent Night” was written. (I once asked Kohr what influences were most important in the formulation of his theories about scale, expecting him to cite some ancient philosopher. He paused, wrinkled his forehead, and said, “Mostly that I was born in a small village.”) Oberndorf, too, was in the cultural orbit of the once-independent city of Salzburg, some fifteen miles away, and though it was not until he was nine that Kohr first visited there, the accomplishments of the city remained impressed upon him his entire life. As he was later to describe it: “The rural population that built this capital ‘city’ (of barely more than 30,000) for its own enjoyment never numbered more than 120,000. . . . Yet, single-handedly they managed to adorn it with more than 30 magnificent churches, castles, and palaces standing in lilied ponds, and an amplitude of fountains, cafes, and inns. And such was their sophisticated taste that they required a dozen theaters, a choir for every church, and an array of composers for every choir, so that it is not surprising that one of the local boys should have been Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. All this was the result of smallness, achieved with not an iota of foreign aid. And what a rich city they made it into.”
