C Doss:
Really, what else is a peasant gonna do? You can't read. There's no TV. You've already had the same conversations with everybody in the village a thousand times. For recreation there's church, hunting, and the occasional festival with dancing and music... and nothing else. Plus, harvest was ages ago and it's mid-winter and it's fucking cold. You're not going to go for long walks in the woods (that you already know like the back of your hand).
J Gulick:
What about coveting thy neighbor's spouse for a little romp in a haystack? (And no mundane barnyard animal jokes, please.)
Cue Doug's channeling of Marx on "rural idiocy" as well as his mockery of utopian, "small is beautiful" anti-modernists.
P.S. For two consecutive winters I lived alone in semi-rural northern Japan, without good transit links or decent native language ability. Despite the fact that I enjoyed literacy sufficient enough to go online (if not to read big hardcover books front to back, hehe), the merely occasional snowshoeing venture in the cedar forests soon got boring and it was not long before I turned to Russian peasant habits myself... so I know what you're talking about.
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