Depression
I'm reading You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe. Look Homeward, Angel is one of my favorite books, but this novel is starting to push it out of the running for number one.
Books seem to have the ability to show up and get read at the right time. The internet hustles for relevance, but books have an easy, quiet knack for it. The last book I finished was Reading Lolita in Tehran. I started it ages ago, and it was such a dull read that it took forever, but now it's paying off. Reading another text about the experience of the educated elite in the Middle East, and about women dealing with the changing political climate in Iran , has certainly added to the interest in what's going on in Iran right now - but more interesting now is how Americans are responding to what's happening on the ground. There's this passionate (as much passion as a person can gather from behind a keyboard) response to what's happening there, that I can't seem to get caught up in... not when I've seen how much democratic freedom Americans have been willing to give up in this country without the slightest hint at a fight.
I suppose that universally, we fall into the same political and economic cycles, despite scholar's best efforts to document the errors of the past. Is it formulas in place that we can't fall out of line with? Is it just complacency? Knowing that what we ignore now won't make an impact until we're too old to take responsibility for it?
Thomas Wolfe reflected on the Great Depression in the 1930s, and what his characters spoke of then is true now.
Different time. Different faces.
Same place. Same mistakes.
From George, Wolfe's central character, and not so thinly-veiled mouthpiece:
"Sometimes it seems to me... that America went off the track somewhere -back around the time of the Civil War, or pretty soon afterwards. Instead of going ahead and developing along the line in which the country started out, it got shunted off in another direction - and now we look around and see we've gone places we didn't mean to go. Suddenly we realize that America has turned into something ugly - and vicious - and corroded at the heart of its power with easy wealth and graft and special privilege... And the worst of it is the intellectual dishonesty which all this corruption has bred. People are afraid to think straight - afraid to face themselves - afraid to look at things and see them as they are. We've become like a nation of advertising men, all hiding behind catch phrases like 'prosperity' and 'rugged individualism' and 'the American way.' And the real things like freedom, and equal opportunity, and the integrity and worth of the individual - things that have belonged to the American dream since the beginning - they have become just words, too. The substance has gone out of them - they're not real any more..."
Sigh.
I need to spend more time with puppies and ponies.
Books seem to have the ability to show up and get read at the right time. The internet hustles for relevance, but books have an easy, quiet knack for it. The last book I finished was Reading Lolita in Tehran. I started it ages ago, and it was such a dull read that it took forever, but now it's paying off. Reading another text about the experience of the educated elite in the Middle East, and about women dealing with the changing political climate in Iran , has certainly added to the interest in what's going on in Iran right now - but more interesting now is how Americans are responding to what's happening on the ground. There's this passionate (as much passion as a person can gather from behind a keyboard) response to what's happening there, that I can't seem to get caught up in... not when I've seen how much democratic freedom Americans have been willing to give up in this country without the slightest hint at a fight.
I suppose that universally, we fall into the same political and economic cycles, despite scholar's best efforts to document the errors of the past. Is it formulas in place that we can't fall out of line with? Is it just complacency? Knowing that what we ignore now won't make an impact until we're too old to take responsibility for it?
Thomas Wolfe reflected on the Great Depression in the 1930s, and what his characters spoke of then is true now.
Different time. Different faces.
Same place. Same mistakes.
From George, Wolfe's central character, and not so thinly-veiled mouthpiece:
"Sometimes it seems to me... that America went off the track somewhere -back around the time of the Civil War, or pretty soon afterwards. Instead of going ahead and developing along the line in which the country started out, it got shunted off in another direction - and now we look around and see we've gone places we didn't mean to go. Suddenly we realize that America has turned into something ugly - and vicious - and corroded at the heart of its power with easy wealth and graft and special privilege... And the worst of it is the intellectual dishonesty which all this corruption has bred. People are afraid to think straight - afraid to face themselves - afraid to look at things and see them as they are. We've become like a nation of advertising men, all hiding behind catch phrases like 'prosperity' and 'rugged individualism' and 'the American way.' And the real things like freedom, and equal opportunity, and the integrity and worth of the individual - things that have belonged to the American dream since the beginning - they have become just words, too. The substance has gone out of them - they're not real any more..."
Sigh.
I need to spend more time with puppies and ponies.
posted by gr at
1:22 AM
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