SOURCE: Schilt, Paige. “Anti-Pastoral and Guilty Vision in Richard Rodriguez's Days of Obligation.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 40, no. 4 (winter 1998): 424–41.

In the following essay, Schilt studies the pastoral qualities of several of the essays in Days of Obligation.

The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil, and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know, too, how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and paneled halls.

—Hugo of St. Victor, from Didascalion¹

In the prologue to his 1982 book Hunger of Memory, Richard Rodriguez defines himself as a specifically middle-class pastoralist. As did Raymond Williams, Rodriguez suggests that the position from which one identifies with rustic...