Helen Knothe Nearing

Helen Knothe was born into a theosophist family in New Jersey in 1904. She did not want a traditional American education, but went to Europe to study the violin. While there she had a relationship and traveled with the young Jiddu Krishnamurti.

Upon her return to the United States, still uncertain what she wanted to do with her life, she met Scott Nearing. Scott, 20 years older, was at the nadir of his life, having been asked to leave two universities for his radical economic and pacifist views, and tried for espionage for “obstructing the enlistment” of men into the Army in 1918. Scott was a prolific writer and speaker and Helen became his secretary and companion. They lived in New York until Scott bought property in 1934 in Vermont which he and Helen called “Forest Farm.”

Helen was a life-long vegetarian and Scott had become one. They wanted to live simply and self-reliantly, as much as possible. They began gardening and harvesting maple sugar which they sold as a cash crop. Each day was divided into three parts, one part for what they called “bread labor (gardening, chopping wood, building in stone),” one part for community work (writing and publishing) and one part for self improvement (educating themselves). In the winter, Scott continued to travel and speak and Helen wrote and published books, the first being The Maple Sugar Book, which described their sugaring techniques.

Helen’s biographer Ellen La Conte says she was an excellent salesman and publicist, with a considerable amount of “hustle.” In addition to writing books, they built nine stone buildings on the farm. Helen had never done physical work but she took to it, gardening, composting, working with wood. She loved building with stone, and became the person who did the pointing, laying in lime or cement mortar between stones.

When their home became part of a holiday ski area, the Nearings moved to Maine, to Cape Rosier, where their cash crop was raising blueberries. Living the Good Life was published in 1954 and it drew countless people to the farm to study the Nearings’ lifestyle. The Nearings were generous, feeding their visitors and getting them to help build roads, buildings and gardens. They lived a very public life, setting high standards for themselves and others, and publishing many more books. Their homesteads had no electricity, used composting outhouses and were heated with wood. Communication was by mail.

When Scott was in his 90’s and Helen in her 70’s, they built their last stone home, publishing Our Home Made of Stone in 1983. By this time Helen was making most of the decisions. She had help with carpentry, but she designed the place and did all the pointing. This last home, also called Forest Farm, has become the Good Life Center, an institute for education. Scott died in 1983 at 100 years of age, and Helen followed in 1995.

I love many things about the way the Nearings lived, and especially Our Home Made of Stone, which is mostly photographs. I have always hoped to one day build a stone house! Biographical materials on Helen are plentiful. She appears in many Youtube videos, including this one. Her own writing on “the good life” is straightforward and practical.

Tereza

Juliette Binoche as Tereza

Milan Kundera’s book The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984] portrays Tereza as the weight which comes to his protagonist Tomas as an ‘It must be.’ Tomas prefers lightness, but “the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.”

Tereza meets Tomas when he comes to the bar where she is working. He sits alone with a book and asks for a cognac. Beethoven is playing on the radio. Tereza, who went to work at 15 to help her family, sees in Tomas a representative of what she has always longed for: a higher culture. “Lives are composed like music, guided by musical motifs,” Kundera tells us. “Without realizing it, an individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.” Tereza goes to Prague and knocks at Tomas’ door. He lets her in, feeling that she is a baby in a bullrush basket, sent down the river to meet him.

This meeting takes place in the mid-1960’s. Tereza moves in with Tomas. His friend Sabine finds Tereza a job on a magazine. Seeing promise in her, Sabine shows her photographs, what is important about each. Tereza takes up the camera and becomes a staff photographer. When the Russians move tanks in to Prague in 1968, repressing Czechoslovakia, Tereza roams the streets, photographing what is happening and handing her film to foreigners to take out of the country.

Sabine moves to Switzerland, and Tomas and Tereza soon follow. Tomas is a surgeon in a hospital. He is happy and feels free and much lighter. But being in a foreign country is like walking a tightrope. Tereza cannot handle the vertigo. She goes back to Prague, feeling weak. Tomas follows her, giving up his passport. Neither of them can leave Czechoslovakia again.

In Prague, both Tomas and Tereza feel the crushing weight of living under communist ideology. Tereza works as a waitress because she cannot be forgiven for giving her film to foreigners. Tomas is asked to retract an article he once wrote, but he will not. He is discharged from his job as a surgeon and takes up window washing. This job feels like a vacation, and he gives in to his adulterous delight in the bodies of women he meets. It makes Tereza miserable. She too has an adventure which seems to be a set up to get her to inform on her customers. Tereza and Tomas hardly see each other except in sleep.

Two years after leaving the hospital, Tomas is physically tired. “Prague has grown so ugly lately,” he tells Tereza. They talk of moving and find work on a communal farm in the country. Tereza minds the heifers, which are turned out each day to pasture, with the help of her dog Karenin. Tomas drives the pickup which takes workers out to the fields. The police stop pestering them, but they are unusual. Other communal farm workers find it is just a job and wish to move to the city. Instead of going dancing, at night they watch television in their homes. Tereza takes comfort among the animals, however. Animals love voluntarily.

When Karenin dies, Tomas and Tereza bury him between the crooked apple trees. Left to her thoughts, Tereza feels responsible for Tomas. It is her fault he moved back from Switzerland. She has used her weakness against him. She is afraid he is bored with her. But, one day she puts on a pretty dress and they go to the next town to dance. “Haven’t you noticed that I’m happy here?” Tomas asks her. Their death in an automobile accident is reported to Sabine by Tomas’ estranged son.

Kundera’s philosophical novel gives him a chance to present his thoughts on many subjects, including a diatribe against kitsch. Kitsch fills Sabine with horror. But Kundera feels it may be inescapable. “The novel is not the author’s confession. It is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.”

Though I loved the movie made of this novel by Philip Kaufman in 1988, Kundera repudiated it. I suspect that the movie did not portray the heaviness of the Russian occupation to the extent we see it in the novel. Tereza remains a finely wrought icon and the contrast Kundera sets up between her character and that of Sabine an interesting question.