The people of the whole world fall into two classes, townsfolk and villagers. The townsfolk build great cities in the most favorable places and live in them. The villagers have chosen the plains, and there, building their little villages far apart from one another, they work the land and do nothing else. The townsfolk's business is craft and trade, and a small number of them also hold the various offices of the country's administration. Ask yourself, Tornik, what is the difference between townsfolk and villagers? What is better and what is worse in the life each of them leads? What is their well-being, and what is their misery?
The picture of town life and village life is a wide one. I will tell you only the main differences, the ones that show on the surface, and leave the rest for you to work out yourself. Dear Tornik, you are not shut up in the village. You go to the city and come back all the time, and you can see everything with your own eyes. And since you have had some schooling, and you have a good head, and you are grown now, you can judge and weigh for yourself both our life and the townsfolk's. Each has its sweetness and its bitterness, its well-being and its misery, its virtue and its vice. Each has many good sides and many bad ones, of many kinds. Our life is a mixture. Good and evil live together in it, the way wheat and weeds spring up and grow together.1
To us it looks as though the townsfolk lead a very happy and comfortable life. Take the city of Van, so near to us. The handsome tall houses, the broad streets, the willows planted row after row along the edge of the waters that run murmuring down many of the streets. We go into the houses and find beautiful rooms, all patterned and painted, filled with fine furnishings. The townsman's table is very rich, laid with sweet and savory dishes the patriarchal household prepares.
And then, Tornik, how pretty and graceful their shapely clothes look to our eyes, cut in every fashion and very costly, the men's and the women's alike. And we should not forget those rows on rows of gold necklaces that the women and the girls hang from their throats. Beyond these bodily comforts and pleasures, the townsfolk have spiritual and moral pleasures too. Their churches and the church's vestments are splendid and glorious. They have the festival ceremonies, the sweet-voiced choristers, the solemn processions and liturgies, and more than anything, the well-trained preaching vardapets,2 who are the glory of the church and the consolation of the people.
Besides religious and spiritual consolation, the townsfolk have one more great consolation, the school, the house of learning, where their boys and their girls learn to read and write. In this the townsfolk have a very great advantage over us, because only education makes a man a man. He lets go of rudeness and coarseness, and he becomes a useful member of human society, of the state of the land, of his people and of his family. The ignorant, untaught man is just the opposite, useless and harmful to his state, his people, and his family.
What a pity, my good Tornik, that your Papik cannot make a long speech to describe and show you what knowledge is and what ignorance is. Don't you know it? Didn't your schoolmaster teach you that knowledge is light and ignorance is darkness? Didn't you read what our holy Yeghishe said,3 that as the blind man is cut off from the rays of the sun, so the ignorant man is cut off from a full life? Just as we villagers are cut off from a full life, morally and materially both. But mark this well, Tornik, and do not suppose that all the townsfolk live in the same comfort. No, do not judge it so. Most of the townsfolk have a wretched, bitter life. They earn their daily food by heavy labor. They live in the strictest poverty, without so much as a bowl of tanapur,4 and it is a great piece of luck if they own one cow or one goat. You will see their houses, not much different from our hovels. You will see their clothes worn out and torn, and their faces without cheer or spark. Worn down all day long with the cares of the household, they go about idle and out of work, and for the most part it is their own laziness that has brought them to that state.
There are also, among the class of townsfolk, men who want to gain themselves credit by covering their inner rot and misery with outward show. They change into new clothes and newer ones, they talk of great matters, until you would take them for men of money and substance who keep a flourishing house. But go into such a house and you will find it empty even of the necessities of life. No bread in the trough, not a spoonful of butter in the crock. How do they live, then? Eh, Tornik, do not ask that. Let me make you understand it in three words, "by deceit, and sundry portions thereof."5 The townsfolk have some education, and in company they have a little polish, but day by day the corruptions of immoral living grow among them. Dear Tornik, I remember how it was fifty years ago. The town families were patriarchal houses, every one of them, God-fearing and reverent, lovers of the church-hour and of prayer. When the sexton went out at cockcrow to sound the call, the whole household would wake, and the men would go to church with the children. That is how the pious fathers of those days trained their sons in piety from boyhood, by their own good example. And the parents' way of teaching was nothing else. The good example counted for more than precept or word. And do you know, Tornik, one good example is worth a thousand precepts. That good time has passed and gone, and it has taken those virtuous patriarchal men with it. The present time has brought new men into the world, because every age has its own men. The world is changed now. Men love progress, only they do not yet know what the conditions, the means, and the aim of true progress are. Our townsfolk have grasped one part of progress and no more, to make money and grow rich, and however it comes about, let it come about. The spirit of avarice and greed for gain has grown so fierce that in buying and selling every man looks only to his own profit. He makes no reckoning, and he does not know, that his neighbor's profit and his own hold together, and that men are always partners in profit with one another. But the insatiable, conscienceless spirit of gain (you would think it was the only thing alive on this earth) says, let me gain, let me grow rich, let me grow great and enjoy every pleasure in the world. What do I care if my neighbor is ruined, or lies fallen at my gate like poor Lazarus, begging for the crumbs off my table?6
But enough of the portrait of the profit-loving townsman, Tornik. Let us turn back to our village, because my purpose is only to speak of village life and village labor, and to show you how sweet the life of the village people is, and how great the fruits of farming are. Agriculture is the mother of every craft in this world, and the world lives by it alone, since man's food and man's life is bread. And I have said nothing yet of the many other plant products that human ingenuity prepares for the needs of our life, so many that they have neither number nor limit. I will give you a short account of all of them, taken together, in the lessons to come.
Notes
- The parable of the wheat and the weeds (the tares of the older English versions) is in Matthew 13:24-30. Khrimian alludes to it in ordinary Armenian, using the everyday word for darnel. ↩
- A vardapet is a celibate priest of the Armenian Church holding the doctor's degree, licensed to preach and teach. ↩
- Yeghishe is the fifth-century Armenian historian and theologian, author of the History of Vardan and the Armenian War. The sentence paraphrases him. ↩
- Tanapur is a soup of yogurt-drink (tan) and grain, the poor man's dish. ↩
- "And portions thereof" (masamb norin) is a liturgical tag of the Armenian Church (used of relics and the like). Papik turns it to dry humor. ↩
- Luke 16:20-21. ↩