In Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she mentions how important it is for there to be a natural place for people to interact with each other because if they don’t, they become more private and less social which in turn makes the damages the city (Jacobs 63). Upon hearing this I remembered Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall as it deals with a similar situation.
The poem is about how every year, two neighbors help repair a stone wall that separates their properties. However, one of the neighbors starts to question why they do this, because there’s no practical reason for it. The neighbor explains that both of them know the extent of their property, and they don’t have any animals on their property. The neighbor also argues that even nature wants the separation to end because they repeatedly have to rebuild the wall due to the boulders falling off and cracks appearing. However, no matter what the man says, his neighbor only replies with the now infamous line “good fences make good neighbors.” The man tries to help his neighbor shake his old fashioned ways about privacy, but soon gives up because he sees that the man is unchanging, with the final line of the poem being “good fences make good neighbors.”
The Mending Wall Metaphor To Live Light Created by Linda Aitkin (2016)
Video: Robert Frost reciting Mending Wall
According to what Jacobs writes, there a few reasons as to why this man is like this. One may be due to the fact that there are no natural places for him and his neighbor to associate. He doesn’t have butchers or candy store owners like Mr. Jaffe or Mr. Cornacchia that helm him to understand the importance of public vs private life to help foster trust within the community (Jacobs 61). People need places like these in order to build healthy relationships. But because none exist in Frost’s poem, the neighbors are practically strangers.
Another reason Jacobs might state is that this man is exactly like the adults who make up excuses to avoid any relationships. He is exactly like the man who says neighbors are dangerous because they’re too gossipy and the woman that says no to relationships because of her husband said so (Jacobs 66). Instead of just trying to understand that this way of living is unhealthy and damages not only them but also the city, they shift the blame to other people instead of accepting that they themselves don’t want a relationship. Instead of nurturing a debate, they only spat the same excuses/defense and never listen to the opposite side.
Despite Mending Wall being published in 1914, it’s scary how relevant it is to the problems New Yorkers faced 4 decades later and still continue to face.
Questions:
- Do you think the wall is good because it forces the neighbors to interact with one another at least once a year, or bad because it stymies any further relationship?
- Could the neighbors in Mending Wall be an accurate representation of the relationship between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses?
- What do you think Jacobs would say about the saying “Good fences make good neighbors?”
