Jane Adams Lecture page 15

Bob Dylan had it right, at least about America: "Those who aren’t busy being born are busy dying." The enormous vitality of the post-World War II period did not translate into a rebirth for the rural. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, our rural communities are dying.

This show should not be an elegy to the rural, but it’s almost impossible not to often feel elegiac: to mourn the passing of a vision of society. It’s important to keep in mind that that vision never truly appeared in life, nonetheless, it embodied something that I believe remains valuable, that we have perhaps irretrievably lost.

The "dark satanic mills" that William Blake railed against have prevailed. An industrialized countryside now confronts us.

There are major cross-currents in the rural these days: Small towns and rural counties fight for prisons for the jobs they provide, though I suspect that even those who fight the hardest to get them feel dirtied by the process: to shift from earning a living through producing the world’s food to standing guard over caged human beings… Incommensurate worlds.

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