Where the wild things were | Books | The Guardian

Source: Where the wild things were | Books | The Guardian

Over the past century, “parochial” has soured as a word. The adjectival form of “parish”, it has come to connote sectarianism, in-sularity, boundedness. A mind or a community turned inward upon itself. A pejorative finitude.

It has not always been this way. Patrick Kavanagh (1904-67), the great poet of the Irish mundane, was in no doubt as to the importance of the parish. For Kavanagh, the parish was not a perimeter, but an aperture: a space through which the world could be seen. “Parochialism is universal,” he wrote. “It deals with the fundamentals.”

Note that Kavanagh, like Aristotle, does not smudge the “universal” into the “general”. The “general”, for Aristotle, was the lazily broad, the vague and undiscerned. The “universal”, by contrast, consisted of fine-tuned principles, induced from an intense concentration on the particular. Again and again in his writing, Kavanagh returned to this connection between the universal and the parochial, and to the idea that we learn by scrutiny of the close-at-hand. “All great civilisations are based on parochialism,” he wrote, beautifully: “To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields – these are as much as a man can fully experience.”