Kith My Ath.

Listened to an interesting if rather rebarbative Start the Week with Jay Griffiths and others discussing her book Kith. Apparently the term didn't used to mean your friends or relatives (as in 'kith and kin'), but rather the first place you identified as important to your sense of self, whether that was a box under the stairs or a treehouse or whatever.

I've since looked up some reviews of her book and, if they're right, can kind of understand why the other guests tried to contradict her apologias for Romanticism and the 'indigenous cultures as better than ours' idea. However, I am glad she brought up the following ideas:

1. Kids respond to the natural world, even if it's only a single tree in the most gridlocked urban setting, because it's one of the ways very young people learn to make metaphor (consder the way we instinctively anthropomorphise animals, imputing them with moral qualities, personality traits, etc.).

2. Kids also get off on nature, or perhaps that should be on non-social spaces, because they need privacy, time when no one's watching them, when they can foster the independence and ingenuity to deal with life's 'asymmetry'. Making dens, sitting in a tree, walking as far away from home as their legs will carry them.

I like the latter thought because I think that, while Romanticism may be discredited for its anti-Augustan glamorisation of violence and wildness or its repudiation of the civic bonds that have historically mitigated against individual savagery/suffering, nature isn't without lessons.

I think the lessons break down into two types. First, there's the lesson of observing things growing and being. This is valuable for humans, as it shows there's life beyond doing. Second, non-social spaces (which might equally, in fairness, be a desolate crag or an empty courtyard in the city), show us otherness; they show us an alternative to the noise and commotion in which we spend the vast majority of our lives. Two valuable means, then, of coming at life differently.