Neighborly

I don't like the word. It smacks of the small scroll given to John to eat in the Revelation, where it is honey in the mouth and sourness in the stomach. It is a sanctimonious word, a word which, once invoked, shuts down further comment, and especially further debate. Calling someone neighborly is smothering them with sentimentality, and calling someone unneighborly is like sentencing them to a term in prison without chance of parole. Robert Frost mocked the man who said "good fences make good neighbors," but he still called his poem "Mending Wall" and the phrase is used ironically. While the two men literally mend the gaps and cracks which have appeared in the low wall between their properties, the contact of doing so, meeting with and talking with his neighbor, leads to Frost losing respect for him. Is it true that familiarity breeds contempt? Perhaps in the case of neighbors, yes. For these people aren't our family, where there is love or affection or, at the least, a feeling of blood-belonging. And they aren't our friends or our lover, entirely a choice of association on the part of everyone involved. No, neighbors are in many ways, I am convinced, the scourge of our social lives.

This is an exceedingly unpopular view for a handful of reasons. It is, to be blunt, completely against the spirit of Christianity, which I claim to profess but have only rarely claimed to ever be good at. In fact, in any religion I can think of, being a good person involves being a good neighbor. And being a good neighbor is expedient in any kind of civil society, where the awareness and interconnectedness of neighbors most always leads to safer and cleaner neighborhoods. The benefits of friendships with neighbors are, admittedly, quite practical: they pick up your mail while you're on vacation, they report any odd activity at your house while you're away, they'll let you borrow their snowblower when the engine dies on yours. Sometimes they cook for you, especially when you're sick. They inquire after your health and sympathize with you about the gophers and rabbits that eat your garden. They keep an eye on your kids when they're out in the yard. If they don't see you for days on end and your car hasn't moved, they come over just to make sure you aren't lying on the bathroom floor with a broken hip.

But the secret everyone knows and no one says is that the number of times in one's life, among all the various places that you live over the course of 80-odd years, how often you meet a random neighbor or two whom you not only like personally but get along with enough to trust and care about is, frankly, miniscule to the point of being a scientific anamoly. My father laments that the 1950s were far different in this respect, but not having experienced the 1950s myself, I can't corroborate. His parents did indeed have a decades-long close friendship with the married couple who lived next door, but they're literally the only family members I can think of who had that, and that was the only close friendship they had with any of their neighbors. "Something there is that doesn't love a wall, that wants it down" Frost says, and there's the implication that whatever that is isn't human. He even suggests elves at one point, but then says that isn't quite right. Frost makes fun of his neighbor for the aphorism of good fences making good neighbors, and questions the aphorism in the course of the poem, but doesn't end up negating it. The best he can do at the end of the poem is to offer the neighbor repeating it in a self-satisfying way, and though that's clearly not a proof of its truth, it's neither a proof of its falsity.

Last week an old high school friend I reconnected with through Facebook posted a quote from Mother Teresa as their status: "I want you to be concerned about your next door neighbor. Do you know your next door neighbor?" My first thought, of course, was that yes, I'm concerned about the guy who lives underneath me - will he wake me up in the middle of the night again because of his excessive snoring and his loud gasping from when he temporarily stops breathing while he's asleep? Yes, I'm concerned about the old man who lives across the landing from me - will he yell at me again because I've opened the landing window on a sunny day to get some fresh air into the building, or will he make another complaint to our landlord about it, or both? Yes, I'm concerned about the other tenant downstairs, who is slowly heading towards a mental breakdown - will the odors coming from her apartment this week just be cooking smells, or will they indicate she's stopped washing herself again? Getting to know my current neighbors has been mainly an exercise in apprehension, wariness, and outright anxiety. For most of the past six months I've been getting frustrated with them, and then getting frustrated with myself for being frustrated. But after a couple of conversations with various people, I'm coming to realize that my apartment building, in its current configuration of people, is simply not a healthy environment.

Mother Teresa doesn't seem to have much to say about this. When a neighbor decides he doesn't like you and complains repeatedly about you to the landlord simply because you enjoy open windows in early Spring, where exactly is the motivation to get to know this man? What happens when a neighbor's emotional and mental issues are far beyond your ability to understand or care for? And I've merely selected the most confusing of a laundry list of odd or hostile characteristics these people exhibit. Lately I've been wondering if the concept of being neighborly was created by extroverts who get so excited around other people, for extroverts who get so excited around other people. I have no wish for my neighbors to come to harm, but mostly I've been thankful when a day passes where I don't have to interact with them, a true introvert's attitude if ever I've heard one. And the other thing I've been thinking about is how over the past decade I've lived in three different apartments, and I've never developed a friendship with any neighbor I've had during that time. But it's not that I regret that, per se. Again, there's a thankfulness associated with it.

Why thankful? Because in my experience, living with other people means that you learn things about them you didn't want to know, things that make you lose respect for them, as Frost did in his poem. Again, there is a difference with family and friends and lovers, but neighborliness does not involve a type of love as far as I can tell. Neighborliness is barely even a word. And I could go into all the various things I've learned about previous neighbors, but that's mean, and not the point of this. The point is, I find it incredibly difficult, historically and currently, to muster up any concern about my neighbors. In my experience, my life has been consistently better the fewer neighbors I've had and the less I've had to interact with them. This feels wrong to me, and yet I can't deny the facts of it.

I also can't deny I'm not the only person out there with these sorts of experiences, and actually, the more people I've spoken with about this, the more stories I've heard of their own bad experiences. The temptation is to say all right then, I should just change my attitude. My neighbors won't bother me, and though it's not necessarily the most realistic way to act, I'll try to conform my behavior, where I can, to adapt to their eccentricities. I've been keeping the landing window closed more often, for example, to try to not anger my neighbor, especially trying to keep it shut when he's around. Apparently it didn't change anything - he recently wrote letters to the other tenants and my landlord asking them to chastise me for my nefarious window habits too.

Days like today are among the days the situation weighs on me. I spent this past weekend housesitting for friends from work, in their lovely little cottage 25 minutes south of Bluebell Town. This morning I stopped by my apartment briefly to drop off my wekeend stuff before heading into work, and things were as I had expected. The building stank. It was clear no one had opened a window all weekend. My own apartment smelled too, as much as I'd tried to seal my front door. My mail had been rifled through. (Yes, I have a neighbor who regularly looks at my mail, though I don't think they've opened anything. One of the reasons why I go home for lunch most workdays is so I can get my mail as soon as it arrives.) But on the plus side, I noticed that a Christmas wreath which one of my neighbors has had on their door since early December had finally been taken down. It's the little things.

It's also remembering a different aphorism than Frost's: "This too shall pass." So far, everyone who's lived in my apartment building has moved on after a year or two, and any animosity they've incurred while they've been here has disappeared when they do. I've never wished any of them to come to harm, it's just I've never wished to continue living in proximity to any of them. But everything changes, and so they move on, or perhaps one day I'll move on, or perhaps one day there will be an actual friendship with one or two of them. I'm not holding my breath, though. From my experience, good fences do make good neighbors. More and more my desire is to have no effect on my neighbors' lives and for them to have no effect on mine.