The Biggest House in the World: a little response to Graham Hill's New York Times op ed "Living with Less. A Lot Less."

In the early 70's I attended a Montesorri pre-school and kindergarten.   I still remember the white walls and learning stations, tables with various fascinating objects and toys designed to engage a young child in abstraction. There were no cars or trains. Really no toys... more tools than toys.  I remember well the gram measure puzzle with the same awe that I remember my first time playing with nesting Russian dolls. But perhaps the most emotionally charged memory was my dear teacher Mrs. Bailey reading to me Leo Lionni's story The Biggest House in the World.  The story is a kind of fable within a fable, of a father snail warning his baby snail about a foolish snail who had ambitiously "twisted and twitched until his house (his shell) was a big as a melon"and then twitched a bit more until multi-colored coronets sprouted all around its shell.  The snail dies soon enough because he can't move his grand new home.  So he dies before he can manage to move on with the others to eat at the next cabbage plant.  And his death is sad, like the relic of a beautiful Dr. Seuss city, or the day the circus died.

Today when I read Graham Hill's New York Times op ed "Living with Less. A Lot Less," I thought of  Leo Lionni's little book.  How I rediscovered the fable a few years ago when my boys were born, and how the re-reading after forty years was so poignant, as if my little self at 4 or 5, already knew that she would follow the teachings of the father snail.  That she would "keep it small.... and when I grow up I shall go wherever I please."  And also that I would one day go out "to see the world." And that world would not be somehow less because the snails lacked colorful coronets or my shell was too commonplace.  Instead it would be what it is, incredibly diverse, incredibly colorful with crystals glittering in the early sun, "polka-dotted mushrooms, and towery stems from which little flowers seemed to wave... a pinecone lying in the lacy shade of ferns, and pebbles in a nest of sand, smooth and round like the eggs of the turtledove."