It seems to me that it is far easier to be civil when the pace is slow and the air is clean and there are no freeways to be stuck on and no malls to work around. And on this island, even with all the people who have moved here over the years, a healthy percentage of the population is either related or grew up with each other. Which does not necessarily lead to civility, but folks here know that they are going to run into everybody again sometime, maybe even a half-dozen times a day.
But it seems to me that something else must be at work here, though I cannot say for certain what it is. It is a place that is filled with small kindnesses and gestures and signs that seem to give evidence of some larger conspiracy, a conspiracy to commit civil society perhaps. Whatever one calls it, I am jealous of it, and I wonder what it would be like to live in the middle of it.
Sometimes I feel as though the people of this island either know something that the rest of us do not or we have forgotten something that they always have remembered.
— Robert Benson, Home By Another Way