‘Lengthens the perspectives’

Town common in Princeton, Mass.

“Predating the merciless grid that seized Manhattan and possessed the vast Midwest, New England towns have each at their center an irregular heart of open grass, vestige of the Puritan common. {The} idea, of land held in common, as ….part of a workaday covenant with the Bestower of a new continent, has permanently imprinted the maps of these towns, and lengthens the perspectives of those who live within them.’’

— John Updike (1932-2009), American novelist, poet, short-story writer and literary and art critic. He lived for most of his adult life in Massachusetts North Shore towns.