The one luxury I allowed myself this weekend (okay, I admit, that's an exaggeration) was Alan Paton's Too Late the Phalarope. It is an exploration of the tension created when a particular society's laws (South African laws under apartheid) conflict with natural law. It reminds me of Huck's ironic self-condemnation in Huckleberry Finn for not turning in Jim, the escaped slave. This raises the question of the relationship between the particular and the universal, between family and friends, between one's language and place and people of other languages and places. This is the great question, I think, for communitarians and agrarians.
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