Before I moved to Charlottesville, I already had a picture in my mind of the perfect place to live. It was a university town with a balance between culture and country. A place with a liberal view of the world that retained its history. A river ran through the middle. You could get a job that paid enough money to buy a house, in the city or the country, depending on your preference.

I’ve tried to find U-topia before, and when I was living near Western Carolina University, the search put me in the middle of a conversation about the difference between a college town and a town with a college. In one, the university is an economic and cultural center that enhances but doesn’t subsume the flavor of the place. In the other, it’s more like an occupying Roman army.

Missoula, Madison, Eugene, Burlington are all neat cities, and they exemplify how in practice there is always a creative tension between school and town. Universities, like armies, want to grow. University towns, which people choose to live in because they are not big cities, don’t.

In my U-topia, I bike to work instead of driving. I can hear music any night of the week. My neighbors wave. I can walk to the river. The food and drink are city good.

At the Monticello Heritage Harvest Festival last weekend––which was a really exciting demonstration of the energy around sustainable agriculture, local food, and cultural preservation––I remembered something about places. You have to love them as they are…but to love them as they are, you have to want to make them better.

Another one of Jefferson’s paradoxes, I guess. Jean-Jacques Rousseau said he’d rather be a man of paradoxes than one of prejudices. I’d rather live in a place of paradoxes than prejudices.
 

 I spent two years teaching high school English on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, and the way I look at the world will never be the same. If there was one idea I took away from my experience with the Lakota, it is how differently oral and written cultures operate. 

Oral cultures are mediated by relationships between individuals. Written cultures by individual relationships to universal ideas.

The value of oral history is that it is tailored to the listener. The truth is ultimately prismatic if not obscure, and the different accounts you get on the Rez of the same event, the same legend, the same prayer convey that reality.

This week’s feature on Chief Gordon and the old Fellini’s exemplifies what is so groovy, and valuable, about narrative non-fiction, our written culture’s attempt to get at the same notion, which is the not so fashionable idea that truth is illusive and we have to be nimble to get close to it.

My wife and I saw Hamlet at the Blackfriars Playhouse Friday night. John Harrell was funny and complicated in the title role. From “conscious doth make cowards of us all” to “the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” he mocked the gap between the stories we tell our ourselves and the ones we tell others.

Back to Chief…every town has its unwritten legends, and some of them should be written down.

Charlottesville, like a lot of places in America, is molting from a regional seat with great accents, flavors, and histories, to a cosmopolitan node in the new economy. Development, politics, ideas, and individuals will shape how this turns out. But so will stories.