walls less and more

The poor live with the wind, with dampness, flying dust, silence, unbearable noise (sometimes with both; yes, that’s possible!) with ants, with large animals, with smells coming from the earth, rats, smoke, rain, vibrations from elsewhere, rumours, nightfall, and with each other. Between the inhabitants and these presences there are no clear marking lines. Inextricably confounded, they together make up the place’s life.

Twilight was setting in; the sky wrapped in cool grey fog, was already being closed off by darkness; and the wind, after spending the day rustling stubble and bare bushes that had gone dead in preparation for winter, now lay itself down in still low places on the earth...

The poor are collectively unseizable. They are not only the majority on the planet, they are everywhere and the smallest event speaks of them. This is why the essential activity of the rich today is the building of walls – walls of concrete, of electronic surveillance, of missile barrages, minefields, frontier controls, and opaque media screens.

~ John Berger, channelling Andrei Platonov, via the marvellous Charlotte Street.

~ Meanwhile ~

The privileged class I am proposing has a substantial material base--a massive hunk of this country's wealth, which is right now being transferred at a fairly rapid pace from the "moving lane" parents to their "aboveground" offspring and heirs. Wealth, however, remains a necessary but insufficient determinant of class. There must also be a common culture, and this culture is what's lacking in today's privileged class.

The basic choice is to recognize that their children are really and truly different from the children of the less successful. ...

Building this culture will, of course, demand special institutions. The most important of these, and the only one that stands a chance of any success against both consumerism and wealth perversity, is boarding school.

~ Nelson Aldrich, really and truly channelling Manifest Destiny, via The Happy Tutor.