Virginia Lee Burton's The Little House and the Fall of Being

At the bookstore the other night, my wife picked up a children's book by Virginia Lee Burton titled The Little House. Later that night, while my son bounced around me and did everything but pay attention, I read it aloud to him and found it to be a work of surprising depth.

The Little House is about a little house in the country. She lives a happy life watching the seasons come and go, the heavenly bodies pass overhead, and the people go about simple, quaint lives. But over time, the Little House is swallowed by a city. Massive buildings rise all around, cars and trains pollute the air with fumes and noise, and the people are busy and stressed. The Little House falls into disrepair and is no longer happy. At the end, however, the Little House gets a new owner, who moves her back into the country where she is happy once more.

For children, the book no doubt has a happy ending, but I found it to be a sad one. The whole premise of the book is that cities swallow and destroy the countryside. The Little House is sure to once more find herself swallowed by an urban jungle. "Progress" is a one-way affair. She may not be able to run next time, or may have no place to run to.

I was surprised recently upon reading a description of the Luddites of 19th-Century England to find that I understood why they broke into factories and smashed the equipment. They were seeing their jobs taken away, and jobs mean food, housing, education, health and self-esteem. Their entire way of life, with its pleasures, was being taken away. The best they could hope for in the years to come was to become a cog in the machine, performing some miniscule task in the division of labor that anyone else could perform just as well.

The Little House, however, hit me most instinctively on a different, broader level, a level that goes beyond the bad effects of urbanization and increasing dominance of technology. I felt as if it represented how change over time results in the loss of something dreadfully important, the passing of a Golden Age, whether that Golden Age is a past time in one’s own life (summers as a child, hanging with friends in high school, dating in college, etc.) or a historical period before one was born (the Roaring Twenties, La Belle Époque--to take examples from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris). We each carry around the idea that there once was a time when life was, so it seems to us now, so much simpler, happier or meaningful. So much richer.

The city--in the broader sense of a total Fall in the quality of being--comes for all of us, just as it will my son. After finishing the book, I wished, not for the first time, that I could somehow spare him all the indignities time has in store for him. I will have to console myself that there are joys as well, and like the Little House at the end of the book, one sometimes finds a respite.

Once again she was lived in and taken care of.
The stars twinkled above her. . . .
A new moon was coming up. . . .
It was Spring . . . .
and all was quiet and peaceful in the country.
--The Little House