'My Attachments Are All Local, Purely Local'

Like many things big, mountains are overrated. Sensible people prefer flat land or, at most, tastefully rolling hills. A grass-covered plain punctuated with groves of trees and a lazy river seems the friendliest of landscapes – perhaps an echo of our evolutionary past in Mother Africa. Landscape shouldn’t show off. I’ll take Nebraska over Switzerland any day. Charles Lamb agrees, as he tells Wordsworth on this date, Jan. 30, in 1801:

“Separate from the pleasure of your company, I don’t much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of you mountaineers can have done with dead Nature.”

Lamb was the ur-urban dweller. One can’t imagine him retiring to pastoral sublimity. Some people feel swallowed by the city and its resident herd. They can’t breathe. Not Lamb, who assembles a Dickensian catalog of London delights:

“The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the Town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old Book stalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes - London itself a pantomime and a masquerade - all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me.”

As we get older we prize familiarity, while the young fancy novelty. Lamb was very much a homebody. After his sister Mary murdered their mother in a fit of madness in 1796, Lamb remained a bachelor and spent the rest of his life caring for her. Home meant sanctuary, a place to be safe. The world would be a happier place if we adopted Lamb’s philosophy, though it’s less a philosophy than an expression of his idiosyncrasy. People happy at home don’t go looking for trouble:

“My attachments are all local, purely local.—I have no passion (or have had none since I was in love, and then it was the spurious engendering of poetry & books) to groves and vallies.—The rooms where I was born, the furniture which has been before my eyes all my life, a book case which has followed me about (like a faithful dog, only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved, old tables, streets, squares, when I have sunned myself, my old school,—these are my mistresses.”