# The Grid Life In the last address I went all round the houses to introduce my distaste for the suburbs, which I will now briefly explore. Part of that distaste is aesthetic: the suburbs just are monotonous. The houses look the same, the malls all have the same stores. There are a couple of old stories that connect in my imagination with the essence of the suburb: one is that part in *A Wrinkle in Time* when Meg and Calvin make their first incursion into Camazotz, a planet that has completely succumbed to "evil", and they first encounter that evil in the form of a Monotonous Neighbourhood: > Below them the town was laid out in harsh angular patterns. The houses in the outskirts were all exactly alike, small square boxes painted gray. Each had a small, rectanguar plot of lawn in front, with a straight line of dull-looking flowers edging the path to the door. Meg had a feeling that if she could count the flowers there would be exactly the same number for each house. C.S. Lewis did much the same thing in *The Great Divorce*: the idea of an endless grid of identical houses serves for him as an actual vision of hell itself: > Several hundred feet below us, already half hidden in the rain and mist, the wet roofs of the town appeared, spreading without a break as far as the eye could reach. …We were now so high that all below us had become featureless. But fields, rivers, or mountains I did not see, and I got the impression that the grey town still filled the whole field of vision. He could almost be flying out of Boston or D.C. with that kind of description. And in fact Lewis's hell even includes an urban-sprawl dynamic that is accurate enough to serve as a prediction even if it wasn't meant as one. But as I was mentioning in the last address, the suburbs don't just look boring; they are generally bad places for humans to live together. They crowd out any natural beauty, which I hold to be the great, irreplaceable balm to human nature, but they also erect invisible force fields between neighbors, even while packing them end-to-end in medium-sized bins. *Why* the suburbs do this is left as an exercise to the reader, as is the *varied extent* to which they do it, and what factors can affect the outcome from place to place. But suffice to say that those of use who live in the suburbs experience the effect -- even thought it's so uniform that, unless you've ever lived in a real community, you probably cannot even imagine a life without those barriers. Now I told you all that, last week and just now, really so that I could tell you this: there may be an upside to the suburbs. And I don't mean an economic upside for lazy general contractors and suburban city councils, but a humanistic, even aesthetic upside, or at least a silver lining, for us, the actual and sad inhabitants. This silver lining goes under two names: the one is anonymity, the other is obscurity. I was working on some shelving one Saturday morning recently when I answered my phone and it was my friend Robert calling from Chicago, where he was attending a conference. When he got to the conference he was shocked to find out how famous he'd become among his fellow attendees. He records these videos about once a day, and calls the "rambles" -- not edited, not scripted, they're not even on YouTube: he records them in one take and puts them up on plain old Facebook. Well he shows up to this conference and finds out...*everyone* recognizes him from these videos. "Everytime I try and get inside my head for even a second," he told me, "someone calls my name from somewhere." Even standing at the urinal, the guy next to him brightened up and said "Oh hey, you're Robert G. aren't you!" After that he had to get away, so he left the conference for another part of town, and not long after that was when he called. "Joel," he said to me, "I'm in a McDonald's right now, and I'm just loving it: sitting here, watching all these people walk by, and *they have no idea who I am*." I thought of this conversaion somehow while reading another John Le Carre novel. The suburbs could feel smothering to a young person with plans to make and places to go, but they would have a peculiar charm for, say, the conspirator, the foreign defector; for "the spy coming in from the cold." The smothering of the suburbs would for that person be a welcome blanket of quiet: a place where no one seeks you out, no one wants to be your particular friend, no one wants anything from you. I am of course not a spy, or a famous person, so I don't really have a choice. For me to picture myself escaping into suburban life under those conditions is really just an imaginative exercise in sour grapes. But if the suburbs are unpleasant because they are monotonous, perhaps we can still find in them an enforced quiet that can be put to good use. Call these houses *cells* or *prayer booths* -- call the suburb your monastery -- and maybe we can find there a life of contemplation. ---- Thanks for listening to Howell Creek Radio. I'm Joel Dueck. The closing music for this episode is *An Old Peasant Like Me* from the Prince Avalanche soundtrack. You can comment on this show, listen to all past episodes and subscribe to all future ones at howellcreekradio.com. Follow us at facebook.com/howellcreek, or on Twitter @HowellCreek. ## Synopsis Radio address for May 3, 2014, a continuation of the [previous episode][nb]. There are lots of reasons not to like cookie-cutter suburban developments, **but:** there *may* be an upside. Mention is made of [*A Wrinkle In Time*][wit] by Madeleine L'Egnle and [*The Great Divorce*][tgd] by C. S. Lewis, and also (somewhat obliquely) of [*The Spy Who Came In From the Cold*][scc] by John Le Carre. Closing music is *An Old Peasant Like Me* from the [*Prince Avalanche*][pa] soundtrack.
[![Arial shot of a Florida suburb](http://howellcreekradio.com/images/19.jpg)][cph]
From *Ciphers*, a book of suburban photography. Photo by Christoph Gielen.