Articles Archive of Michael Henderson
It was one of the saddest phrases I have heard in a long time. A new woman has just moved into our street. We welcomed her with coffee parties and introductions to local groups and the like. The neighbor on one side was very friendly. The newcomer approached the woman on the other side. She was rebuffed with the words, ‘I don’t do neighbors.’
How sad for all concerned. What unfortunate experiences or unresolved fears must have prompted such a response. I suppose for the newcomer that’s at least better than being confronted by the proverbial neighbor from hell. A British charity Help the Aged has just released figure indicating that 1.4 million people are socially isolated and 300,000 people go a week without speaking to a neighbor or a family member. Recent news from Austria underlines how little some people may know even about the people next door.
However, one shouldn’t make too much out of one phrase. ’As Robert Frost’s neighbor told him. ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ The lady is probably more honest than some. Most of us like to conserve some private space. And none of us can afford to be self-righteous. It was Thoreau who wrote, ‘Any man more right than his neighbours constitutes a majority of one.’ One French writer Moliere claimed that ‘those whose conduct gives room for talk are always first to attack their neighbors’ and another Frenchman, Anatole France that ‘those who have given themselves the most concern about the happiness of people have made their neighbors very miserable.’
We can’t all aspire to fulfil the words of Confucius: ‘Virtue is not left to stand alone. He who practices it will have neighbors.’ We would be very short of sitcom material if we all were neighborly. No wonder we draw for drama on Jane Austen who wrote, ‘For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn.
Neighbors have a special place in The Bible. The second half of the summary of the Law, we are told, is ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’. I personally am of the old school that believes this is an injunction not to love yourself, as seems to be a current interpretation, but almost a sense of humour on the part of God, with him saying to us, ‘I know how much you guys are in love with yourself, give that love to others.’
One of the best known stories in the Bible is about a lawyer who, wanting to justify himself, asked Jesus, ‘Who is my neighbor?’ Jesus answered with the story of the man who was beaten up by robbers and left for dead on the road. He described the two men, the priest and the Levite, who, to use a phrase which still carries meaning today, passed by on the other side, and the third man, a Samaritan who bound up the victim’s wounds and who, if we transposed the story into the modern idiom, gave him a lift in his own car and took him to a hotel. Then the Samaritan left money at the desk with the instructions that the man should be looked after and he would pick up the tab on his return. Which of the three, Jesus asked, proved to be the neighbor.
There is also a lot in the Bible about keeping up with the Jones family. It is all slightly obscured by an old fashioned word, covet. That is defined in one of my dictionaries as yearning to possess and in another desiring eagerly something belonging especially to another person. You shall not desire eagerly your neighbor’s house, your neighbor’s wife, your neighbor’s au pair, neither his swimming pool nor his ride-on mower nor her 4x4 or her handbag, indeed, you shall not desire eagerly anything that is your neighbor’s. The advertising industry would have a heck of a job if we took that seriously.
When I was a teenager I saw a remarkable musical called ‘The Good Road’. One of the most popular songs, which found a response whatever language it was shown in, was about farming neighbors who were reconciled. Its theme was ‘The whole world is my neighbor.’ I notice that the Charter of the United Nations calls on us to practice tolerance and live together in peace with one another ‘as good neighbors.’
I thought I would google the phrase ‘The whole world is my neighbor’ and came up with a few hits. As most of you know if you put a group of words between quotation marks the search comes up with answers where the whole phrase is used. One was the opposite of my message today: ‘the person who annoys me most in the whole world is my neighbor.’
Articles Archive of Michael Henderson
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