A Month in the Country (1980) by J. L. Carr is a short novel that describes the re-emergence of a shell-shocked World War I veteran through his engagement with a small community. The focus of Pope Francis' encyclical Fratelli Tutti is for us to extend out from self and family to a suffering world. He urges us to pull back from protectionism, individualism, and isolation to a more global perspective—in short, to open our “local” arms to embrace a greater “global.” By looking at A Month in the Country, Neil Garrod will discuss how someone who has lost their sense of local can rebuild themselves through engagement with the global. It is not as straightforward as adopting someone else's local but, rather, reshaping one’s own local from interactions with the various other locals that make up the global.
By taking the perspective of rebuilding an empty husk, A Month in the Country provides a strong endorsement of the importance of the global to each and every one of us. Rather than a hectoring, political, religious, or moral stance, it simply conveys the need we all have to maintain our own sense of self.
This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project and the Georgetown Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University with Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the series Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Wikimedia UK.
