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My sisters texts me from home, where she has returned for a day — our small city in Pennsylvania: she complains that it is spiritually dead; fat, lethargic baby boomers, top-40 radio installed all along the Colonial downtown, complacent suburban Millennials stewing in their own meaninglessness. Surely she is right — all those things exist, are real, and real problems for the soul, hers and everyones’.
I go home much more often then she does, and am not really bothered by the same issues. I just stay in the garden, or go for walks in the old cemeteries, or ride my bike, or play basketball — I skip the pathetic, modern commercial aspect of the suburbanized ‘downtown’ shopping experience; just try to run my hands along the texture of the deep past; the contours of the old Moravian village that exists beneath the sediment of modernity. It is a long-running debate between my sister and I: she feels oppressed by home; for me, it is a relief. We both agree that the modern American small town is horror — we just disagree about how to interpret it.
(I write all this from the 2 train to Manhattan, where I’m going on a job interview).
When you look at how empty, commercialized, fundamentally banal American life is — you become non-partisan. The stupid, crass way we live has nothing to do with what political party is in power. It’s the result of a centuries-long struggle between the mercantile spirit and what I’ll call the Emersonian spirit — the American sublime. The American sublime is something that’s buried, hidden underneath strip malls…
