A great deal lay hidden and half-hidden in this small, peaceful town. Well before you understood all of it, you would feel you understood too much. Northampton wasn’t New York or Calcutta. It wasn’t even as large as the little cities to its south. As places go, it seemed so orderly. But what an appaling abundance it contained. If all the town were transparent, if the roofs came off all the buildings and the houses and the cars, and you were forced to look down and see in one broad sweep everything that had happened here and was happening, inside the offices, the businesses, the college dormitories, the apartments, the hospitals, the police station, and also on the playing fields and the sidewalks, in the meadows and the parks and the parking lots and the graveyards and the boats out on the river, you’d be overcome before you turned away. And not just by the malignancy and suffering, but by all the tenderness and joy, all the little acts of courage and kindness and simple competence and diligence operation all the time. To apprehend it all at once—who could stand it? No wonder so much remains invisible in towns.
Tracy Kidder, Home Town (New York: Random House, 1999). Page 79.
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