Anam Cara

The Neighbour

The neighbour is an interesting presence in one’s life. No great significance is ever ascribed to the neighbour. They are the people who happen to live adjacent to you. Yet in contrast to others outside the neighbourhood, we feel we somehow have a claim on the courtesy and friendliness of our neighbours. In former times, when people were not such targets of pressure and impression, people were closer to their neighbours. People were poorer, too, and more dependent on each other. In Conamara, there is the phrase “Is fearr comharsa maith ná mailín airgid,” i.e., A good neighbour is better than a bag of money. Often, when we need something or someone urgently, our friends and family may be far away. The only ones we have near us are our neighbours. They are the individuals with whom we belong in a local place. In the fragmentation of contemporary life, people live in greater isolation and distance from each other. The old image of the neighbourhood as a group of local individuals who knew each other and met with each other has vanished. A neighbour can be dead for weeks next door and we do not notice now. Our post-modern society is like the world of Leibniz’s monadology. Each individual, each home, is an isolated monad with no bridge to the neighbour.

There is also the old phrase “Good fences make good neighbours.” Robert Frost in his poem “Mending Wall” subverts this notion: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Yet in the old phrase is the idea that a certain kind of neighbour can limit your independence and freedom and invade your privacy. Just because people dwell near you, they have no right to control your life. The ideal neigh-bourliness means a balance between caring for those near you, but also keeping space free to engage and inhabit your own life. The atmosphere of the neighbourhood should never cripple the longing of the soul to wander.