Editorial December 11, 1995 Issue

Joys of the simple life—now

Mary Metzner Trammell

"Don't waste your money on those books!" the bookstore owner said. "Those books on the simple life—they're just clichés. I know. I tried it for ten years up in Vermont!"

For the next fifteen minutes, this philosopher-bookseller paced back and forth, telling us all about what happened in Vermont, a state in the northeastern part of the United States. He and a friend had moved to a shack in the woods to live a life of total simplicity: no phone, no car, no electricity, no running water, no money. Just a fireplace, a couple of mattresses, and a little vegetable garden out back. At first, it was idyllic.

But then, he said, "reality set in." They didn't have enough food, so they had to get jobs. And to travel to the jobs, they had to have transportation. And to pay for the transportation (an old truck), they needed more of the thing they were most suspicious of—money. Bit by bit, their ideal of bare-boned simplicity began slipping away.

Send a comment to the editors

NEXT IN THIS ISSUE

Testimony of Healing

Some years ago a very painful condition affected the side of my...