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The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know, too, how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and paneled halls.
Hugo of St. Victor, from Didascaliorf
In the prologue to his 1982 book Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez defines himself as a specifically middle-class pastoralist. As did Raymond Williams, Rodriguez suggests that the position from which one identifies with rustic life is all-important to the nature of the compensations that this complicated structure of feeling can provide:
Upper-class pastoral can admit envy for the intimate pleasures of rustic life as an arrogant way of reminding its listeners of their difference - their own public power and civic position. ("Let's be shepherds . . . Ah, if only we could.") Unlike the upper class, the middle class lives in a public world, lacking great individual power and standing. Middle-class pastoral is, therefore, a more difficult hymn. There is no grand compensation to the admission of envy of the poor. The middle class rather is tempted by the pastoral impulse to deny its difference from the lower class - even to attempt cheap imitations of lower-class life. ("But I still am a shepherd!") (6)
Even as he outlines the middle-class pastoral, Rodriguez maintains a suspicious relation to it. The emphasis on his middle-class status is meant to deny any easy access to the intimate world of his Spanish-speaking, working-class childhood. To pretend otherwise would, he suggests, blur "the distinction so necessary to social reform" (6). Here Rodriguez is insisting, as he will throughout Hunger of Memory, on a measure of irreconcilability between the private world of the immigrant family and the public world of citizenship and education. The necessity of loss in the transition from one realm to another is key to his attempted intervention in debates over American education. Ironically, some of the most attractive (and marketable) moments in Hunger of Memory are precisely Rodriguez's depictions of the embracing, close-knit, Spanish-speaking family. Thus, as he positions...