Would You Rather Live in a Big City or a Small Town?

I keep a file titled “Good Reads,” into which I tuck stories and articles that I enjoyed reading and like to revisit from time to time. The other day, I pulled the file out and found a photocopied page from the book O Pioneers! by Willa Cather.

I copied the page for a particular speech, spoken by Carl, who has just left Chicago, to Alexandra, who is trying to keep things together on her family farm on the Nebraska prairie. Read the quote after the jump.

Here you are an individual, you have a background of your own, you would be missed. But off there in the cities there are thousands of rolling stones like me. We are all alike; we have no ties, we know nobody, we own nothing. When one of us dies, they scarcely know where to bury him. Our landlady and the delicatessen man are our mourners, and we leave nothing behind us but a frock-coat and a fiddle, or an easel, or a typewriter, or whatever tool we got our living by. All we have ever managed to do is pay our rent, the exorbitant rent that one has to pay for a few square feet of space near the heart of things. We have no house, no place, no people of our own. We live in the streets, in the parks, in the theatres. We sit in restaurants and concert halls and look about at the hundreds of our own kind and shudder.

I felt all “right on, right on” about this speech the first time I read it, which is why I copied and saved it. I had recently moved to Dallas from New York City and I was discovering the nation beyond my big city home town.

For a long time, I imagined I wanted to live in a small town and that Dallas was just a stop en route to that. But after years of life and travel, I’ve come to understand that I’m not cut out for small-town life. It’s not because I need theater, symphony and shopping (although I do like lots of restaurants). No, it’s because I like a certain level of anonymity in my day-to-day life. The intimacy of a small-town—even a small-city—sounds difficult.

I remember visiting an old friend in a small Montana town in the early 1980s. My first night in town, we walked into a bar and a cowboy hollered, “Hey, New York!” I was a little spooked that my presence in town was such fast-traveling news. (Not too spooked to dance with the cowboy, though.)

And the gossip—my gosh, the gossip. When I was working on a travel story in a small Texas town known for its bed-and-breakfast inns, I got my ear bent all over town by B&B owners dishing about other B&B owners. And not kindly.

This all comes to mind after two of my Flyover America posts attracted interesting but frankly hostile comments about high-profile individuals in small cities. When you dare to stand out in a small town or city, you have nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Yikes.

As much as I enjoy visiting small towns, I’ll take big-city life. At the very least, it’s pretty easy for me to avoid people I dislike, and if they talk trash about me, I might never have to hear about it.

So, which is better/worse? Anonymity in the big city or intimacy in a small town?

©2026 World Hum, All Rights Reserved