Country sage, city shrewd

espite benefits, there are reasons to avoid large cities

So, Mum and Dad (as they revere parents around here), I'm still debating if a quiet backwater is the best place to survey pre-emergent noogenesis.

Should I have made camp in New York :-) or is backwater the best vantage?

Megalopolis dwellers gain sophistication at the expense of perspective. The spot is too hot, the cultivated too cosmopolitan - and not necessarily cool.

Though more sages than have ever lived now do so in New York, London, Paris, Manila, Delhi, Beijing and Tokyo, their combined accumulated wisdom is diminished by metropolitan proximity.

Peer feedback is too tight, audience adulation too loud. Perspective and independence suffer.

Consensus reality comprehensively consumes intellect - and irresistibly so in societal pressure cookers, aka cities.

Acumen is absent in both urban media and its consumer, the nexus so tight between these symbiotes that the only intellectual oasis is the nexus itself. Like bridging matter in a binary star, surviving in the nexus requires balancing irresistible forces. Only the strongest intellect resists being sucked into either suffocating soup of confused consensus.

Entertainment's staple, sangfroid rustic's adroit lampooning of city cousin, takes as given dry wisdom the undoing of urbane.

Truth implicit - self-sufficiency sets broad conceptual scope. Trivia challenged, superfluous soon shed for survival.

Non-city folk are, by definition, unsophisticated. Not dumb, nor easily duped. As shysters and sophisticates are easily unmasked, so too stupid, dangerous ideas stand exposed for what they are in the purifying vastness of field and forest.

Small cities happily lack sophistication. The 'in crowd' is small and of minor influence (legends only' in their own lunchtime'), ruling only the feebleminded. And unlike small villages and towns, offer freedom to broad perspectives.

Overly-fashionable ideas from über-cognoscenti deflate like cheap party balloons in the absence of affectation. Self-serving vortices of fashion and cults dissipate in regional realities as whirlwinds fade from the storm.

A large pond in a small forest - I shall stay in this tiny town.

With Respect and Love
Your Beloved Son