Loving and Leaving the Good Life

Loving and Leaving the Good Life

By: Helen Nearing  

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Average Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Publisher: Chelsea Green

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Loving And Leaving The Good Life - For the reader who is interested in principled people who made a series of transitions out of choice and necessity. The Nearing's rugged individualist days of trial, triumph and living in ways they wouldn't trade for other compromises are defining and provide an excellent source of perspective on values and points of conclusion.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Bio of an odd couple - Scott and Helen Nearing spent half a century building stone houses, growing their food, and making a living on primitive homesteads in Vermont and Maine. Scott died at age 100 in the 1980s. Helen lasted another 10 years or so and this is her account of her life before Scott and their life together.

Helen was born into a well-to-do family but had a rebellious streak that led her into music, astrology, the occult, and philosophy. In the 1920s she was the lover -- at least on the mental plane -- of an Indian philospher named Krisnamurti who was apparently famous in his day. Helen assumes that the reader knows who this "world teacher" was. I confess I never heard of him --and more explanation as to who he was and what he taught would have been helpful. Later Helen took up with Scott and they moved to the country and spent the rest of their lives as homesteaders.

Scott was a cantankerous communist and I didn't grow any fonder of him by reading Helen's account. He was rigid and narrow-minded. Helen quotes some of his letters. He wrote her in a tone that would inspire my wife to respond, "Buzz off, you old goat." Although she wouldn't say "buzz." Scott's wrote savage letters to his son by a previous wife. Small wonder the boy dropped the last name of Nearing. In Scott's eyes, his son committed the unpardonable sin of criticizing the Soviet Union -- and Scott refused even to go to his funeral. One wonders whether Helen might be getting a bit of posthumous revenge on the old radical by publishing letters he wrote that show him as less than benign.

However, the bulk of the book is a a highly favorable account of Scott and Helen and their life together. They were the gurus of the back to the land movement in the 1960s and the 1970s and their books about their life in the country are minor classics. Read "Living the Good Life" first and if you are interested in learning more about the Nearings read this book. Whatever you may think of them the Nearings were an interesting couple. Their homestead can be visited near Castine, ME.

Smallchief

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
We are fortunate that Helen left us this book - When your 100-year old husband of 55 years has passed on and you, at 88, can see your own end, and when you have spent most of those years seeking and living the good life, and when you take the time and trouble to record your thoughts for posterity, it is surely worthwhile for us, the readers, to take note and reflect on what might be of value in our own goal of living the good life. This is not a biography of the husband, Scott, nor an autobiography of Helen but it is offered as a tribute to Scott's being as Helen knew it. She wants Scott to be remembered as an unassuming, kindly, wise, husband as well as a principled, uncompromising, intellectual radical; she also wants to share with us his peaceful, intentioned, and premeditated ending.

Born in the upper echelons of society, he worked alongside immigrant laborers in the Pennsylvania mine run by his grandfather. This was a formative experience that resulted in his speaking publicly in his early twenties on liberal reform. '''Even before I began the study of economics,' he said in an early lecture, 'I was impressed by the monstrous inequality which exists between the rich and the poor in modern society. The rich enjoy wealth, leisure, and boundless opportunity. The poor are overwhelmed by misery, overwork, and insanitation. The rich have a heaven of opportunity; the poor a hell of misery, and the heaven of the rich is founded upon the hell of the poor. If I was impressed by these conditions before I had studied them, I was appalled after having given them careful consideration. I had heard of poverty; I believed that misery and vice existed, but I was not aware that they were prevalent in every town and city of the land. Ability and capacity were suppressed; together with the progress which might well be attained, were opportunity more universal ... The poor are ignorant of the fact that by standing together at the ballot box, they might revolutionize conditions in a decade.'"

Very soon he had offended the powers that be with his outspoken views and he would never teach again in the United States. From that point Scott's life can be summed up in these sentences: "The living of an ideal involves payment of a certain price ... the further the ideal is removed from the common practice, the higher the price that must be paid for it ... If your ideal is to live a mentally active, mentally honest life, to seek the truth, then you may have to sacrifice even food, clothing, and shelter to get it." and "The majority will always be for caution, hesitation, and the status quo - always against creation and innovation. The innovator - he who leaves the beaten track - must therefore always be a minoritarian - always be an object of opposition, scorn, hatred. It is part of the price he must pay for the ecstasy that accompanies creative thinking and acting." Scott was aware of the price he would have to pay for his convictions; he regretted enormously the loss of the day-to-day contact with his university students who lost an outstanding educator; but he never regretted standing alone. One of his file cards clearly defined the problem: "If a man is one step ahead of the crowd he is a leader; if two steps ahead, he is a disturber; if three steps, he is a fanatic and not to be trusted." Scott was too many steps ahead of those in authority and he was a danger who had to be removed. At the age of 34 his chosen career was in ruins; his books that had been standard textbooks in public schools were banned and royalty income ceased. He was at the low point of his life and that was when he met Helen.

Helen, born in 1904 into a family of high principles and adequate means was the unconventional child, always reading and addicted to the twelve volumes of the Book of Knowledge at a young age. She had a talent for the violin, preferred the company of trees and rocks, drew and wrote poetry. She did not accept unquestioningly the world in which she lived. As a teenager she felt there was a power and a purpose in the universe and queried what we are here for and what life is all about. At seventeen, she sailed to Rotterdam to study the violin, met up with the Theosophists and the young Krishnamurti who she followed for several years on his mission to be a world teacher. But she saw the vast abyss between the ultra rich and the homeless in Bombay and Calcutta while Krishnamurti surrounded himself with the well to do, the famous and the influential. It was time for her to strike out on her own path. She returned to Ridgewood and there received a phone call from Scott.

The formative years for both of them were over; they were ready for each other; they were ready to build a life together; they were ready to create their version of the good life. We have much to learn from this couple because their life together was built on high principles. We are indeed fortunate that Helen left us this book.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A book worth owning - Having encountered the Nearings in Mother Earth News in the 70's I quickly became an avid admirer as well as a sincere follower of their wisdom. Thus I was overjoyed to buy Helens book because it allowed me to see a side of both Scott and Helen I never knew that well. The man whom I had admired as a wise soul but a tad put off by people, comes across as such a loving and yes "romantic" soul which made me like him even more. And Helen sharing how she was raised and the experiences she had and how she was encouraged by Scott to spread her wings and not allow him to fence her in, is a must read for any woman who questions where she belongs in the whole life circle.

We must own a good five hundred books that we love, but this book is amongst a handful that get read and re-read over and over, with something new being learned each time. I also think the book like all their books is a must read, because it reminds us how fascists this country (united states) has been and can be and the price sincere patriots often pay. As well as the value of taking the path less traveled and not relinquishing ones personal integrity or perseverance. And that in the end the good guy can win.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A Wonderful & Memorable Recollection By Helen Nearing! - In today's youth-obsessed contemporary culture, it is a rare treat to be able to find a book so full of loving wisdom written by someone so involved socially, politically, and spiritually in the events of the 20th century. Therefore, I was enthralled in reading Helen Nearing's moving, absorbing and often quite disarming recollections and reflections on her life, both as an individual and as the lifetime partner of one of the most celebrated critics, iconoclasts and individualists of our time, economist, philosopher and social critic Scott Nearing.

The two lived lives singularly devoid of apologies, half-efforts, or excuses, living it largely on their own terms, based on their own labors and ingenuity. Early in the 1930s they struck out from New York City to escape the Depression and social convention by starting a revolutionary experiment in rural Vermont. In many respects the experiment succeeded, yet they were never able to transform it from a personal adventure to one more largely social and community-based in the Vermont setting. With the coming of ski resorts and encroaching exurbia in the early 1950s, the Nearings moved once again to rural Penobscot Bay in Maine to start again.

Of course, in due time they were suddenly "discovered" by the baby boomers and the counterculture in the late 1960s, and became the elder statesmen of the `back-to-the-land' movement of the late sixties and early seventies. In all this, Scott and Helen continued in their commitment to a socially aware, civically responsible, and environmentally sustainable way of living. By the time Scott died at age 100 in the early 1980s, thousands of curious counterculture hopefuls made the pilgrimage to visit with the Nearings at their celebrated farm in rural coastal Maine.

This is a lovely, thoughtful, and wise book, full of the almost endless love and care and compassion Helen Nearing brought to all of her endeavors for her many decades of purposeful and socially responsible living. This book is no small treasure; it looms large and lovely for those who are aware of the incredible journey the Nearings made as fellow citizens, and also of the loving and special relationship these two rugged individualists shared. I have read it several times, and love having it on my bookshelf. I suspect you will too.

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