Gumpas’s speech is littered with abstractions, and abstractions of things that have become more important than real things, real loves. He feels some vague loyalty to hazy bureaucratic value words like development and economic necessity, terms that seem full of imperative urgency but have no power to evoke love for real, concrete things, in contrast to the Elizabethan schoolboy who knew and loved “farriery, forestry, archery, hawking, sowing, ditching, thatching, brewing, baking, weaving, and practical astronomy.” No. Gumpas is a modern. He would have loved to have helped us in our effort to
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