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Observer
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Observer
How literature lost its mojo
I'm old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews. If you look at the Publisher's Weekly list of bestselling novels of 1962, you find Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and JD Salinger. Today it's largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today's F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace? I'm not saying novels are worse now. I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanising effect on our culture. There used to be a sense that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, 'The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.' Why has literature become less central to American life? The most obvious culprit is the Internet. It has destroyed everybody's attention spans. I find this somewhat persuasive but not mostly so. The decline in literary fiction began in the 1980s and 1990s, before the Internet was dominant. People still have attention span enough to read the classics. George Orwell's '1984' (an essential guide for the current moment) has sold over 30 million books and Jane Austen's 'Pride and Prejudice' has sold over 20 million. People still have the attention span to read a few contemporary writers — Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith, for example — and a sprinkling of reliably left-wing literary novels: Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' and Barbara Kingsolver's 'Demon Copperhead.' It's just that interest in contemporary writers overall has collapsed. I would tell a different story about the decline of literary fiction, and it is a story about social pressure and conformity. What qualities mark nearly every great cultural moment? Confidence and audacity. Look at Renaissance art or Russian or Victorian novels. I would say there has been a general loss in confidence and audacity across Western culture over the past 50 years. In the 1970s, artists and writers were attempting big, audacious things. In literature there was Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye,' Thomas Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' and Saul Bellow's 'Humboldt's Gift.' In movies there was 'The Godfather' — I and II — and 'Apocalypse Now.' Rock stars were writing long ambitious anthems: 'Stairway to Heaven,' 'Free Bird' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' Even the most influential journalists were audacious: Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson. Everything feels commercialised, bureaucratised and less freewheeling today. Furthermore, the literary world is a progressive world, and progressivism — forgive me, left-wing readers — has a conformity problem. Even more than on the right, there are incredible social pressures in left-wing circles to not say anything objectionable. (On the right, by contrast, it seems that you get rewarded the more objectionable things you can say.) Conformity is fine in some professions, like being a congressional aide. You're not being paid to have your own opinions. But it is not fine in the writing business. The whole point is to be an independent thinker, in the social theorist Irving Howe's words, to stand 'firm and alone.' Given the standards of their time, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain and James Baldwin had incredible guts and their work is great because of their nonconformity and courage. If the social pressures right around you are powerful, you're going to write for the coterie of people who consciously or unconsciously enforce them. If you write in fear of social exile, your villains will suck. You'll assign them a few one-dimensional malevolences, but you won't make them compelling and, in their dark way, seductive. You won't want to be seen as endorsing views or characters that might get you cancelled. Most important, if you don't have raw social courage, you're not going to get out of your little bubble and do the reporting necessary to understand what's going on in the lives of people unlike yourself — in that vast boiling cauldron that is America. We have lived, for at least the past decade, in a time of immense public controversy. Our interior lives are being battered by the shock waves of public events. There has been a comprehensive loss of faith. I would love to read big novels capturing these psychological and spiritual storms. And yet sometimes when I peek into the literary world, it feels like a subculture off to the side. Literature and drama have a unique ability to communicate what makes other people tick. Even a great TV series doesn't give you access to the interior life of another human being the way literature does. Novels can capture the ineffable but all-powerful zeitgeist of an era with a richness that screens and visual media can't match. It strikes me as highly improbable that after nearly 600 years the power of printed words on a page is going to go away. I would put my money on literature's comeback, and that will be a great blow to the forces of dehumanisation all around us. — The New York Times
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
How Literature Lost Its Mojo
I'm old enough to remember when novelists were big-time. When I was in college in the 1980s, new novels from Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, John Updike, Alice Walker and others were cultural events. There were reviews and counter-reviews and arguments about the reviews. It's not just my nostalgia that's inventing this. In the mid- to late 20th century, literary fiction attracted huge audiences. If you look at the Publisher's Weekly list of best-selling novels of 1962, you find Katherine Anne Porter, Herman Wouk and J.D. Salinger. The next year you find Mary McCarthy and John O'Hara. From a recent Substack essay called 'The Cultural Decline of Literary Fiction' by Owen Yingling, I learned that E.L. Doctorow's 'Ragtime' was the best-selling book of 1974, Roth's 'Portnoy's Complaint' was the best-selling book of 1969, Vladimir Nabokov's 'Lolita' was No. 3 in 1958, and Boris Pasternak's 'Doctor Zhivago' was No. 1. Today it's largely Colleen Hoover and fantasy novels and genre fiction. The National Endowment for the Arts has been surveying people for decades, and the number of people who even claim to read literature has been declining steadily since 1982. Yingling reports that no work of literary fiction has been on the Publisher's Weekly yearly top 10 best-selling list since 2001. I have no problem with genre and popular books, but where is today's F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, George Eliot, Jane Austen or David Foster Wallace? I'm not saying novels are worse now (I wouldn't know how to measure such a thing). I am saying that literature plays a much smaller role in our national life, and this has a dehumanizing effect on our culture. There used to be a sense, inherited from the Romantic era, that novelists and artists served as consciences of the nation, as sages and prophets, who could stand apart and tell us who we are. As the sociologist C. Wright Mills once put it, 'The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely lively things.' As a result of this assumption, novelists were accorded lavish attention as late as the 1980s, and some became astoundingly famous: Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote. Literary talk was so central that even some critics got famous: Susan Sontag, Alfred Kazin and before them Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson. There were vastly more book review outlets, in newspapers across the country and in influential magazines like The New Republic. Why has literature become less central to American life? The most obvious culprit is the internet. It has destroyed everybody's attention spans. I find this somewhat persuasive but not mostly so. As Yingling points out, the decline in literary fiction began in the 1980s and 1990s, before the internet was dominant. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
15-05-2025
- Automotive
- New York Times
What a New American Citizen Learned on Route 66
ON A BLUE Chicago morning in October, the tiny-leaved canopies of honey locusts turning gold against the horizon of the Great Lake beyond, I stood in the Enterprise car rental agency on South Michigan Avenue, gazing with trepidation at the Dodge Charger parked outside. 'Did you see it?' asked the agent. I nodded through a fog of nerves. It felt like a joke had been carried too far. Months before, I had typed out a few fevered paragraphs to my editor about wanting to do a classic all-American road trip, following the outline of Route 66, once known as the Main Street of America, from the Great Lakes to the Pacific Coast, stopping in places that sounded breathtakingly exotic to my foreign ears — St. Louis; Tulsa, Okla.; Amarillo, Texas; Santa Fe, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz. Now I was confronted with the terrifying result: an American muscle car waiting for me to get in. I had only recently reacquired a license after almost 20 years, and I had never driven more than a few hours at a time in my life. The idea that this automobile, with its mean face and hulking body painted in what a man at a gas station in Missouri would lovingly describe to me as 'an off shade of battle gray,' would arrive in Los Angeles in fewer than 10 days with me at the wheel seemed unthinkable. I signed a contract and headed into the bright autumn sunshine. As signs to St. Louis channeled me down a six-lane highway (Interstate 55 South), and Saul Bellow's city reappeared in my rearview mirror — 'I am an American, Chicago born — Chicago, that somber city … ,' the opening lines of his 1953 novel, 'The Adventures of Augie March,' went through my head — my breathing slowed. Road trips for me had always been about making a whole of the places that lay between two points, of filling in the gaps. When, in 2005, I went by land from Venice to New Delhi, it was because I felt torn between Europe and Asia, and I thought in seeing what lay between I would be able to resolve some of my cultural anxieties related to place and belonging. I wasn't wrong: The memory of Eastern Europe, Turkey, Arabia and Iran had stayed with me all these years, serving as a ballast against the surreality of air travel: the Delhi-London flight that left me forever balancing two societies in my head. America, where I attended college and returned to live 10 years ago when I was 34, brought anxieties of its own. I was a relatively new American, having become a citizen in 2020. But I had lived here with what felt like a systematic incuriosity about the country west of New York. I went every year for Christmas to Tennessee, where my husband is from, but I resisted that most American of American injunctions to go west. The shape of my world had India on one side, the East Coast of the United States on the other and, on some subliminal level, I was afraid of expanding my worldview westward, almost as if it would spread me too thin. It wasn't rational, but these things rarely are. I was intimidated by the immensity of America and felt a kind of panic at the sight of those downtowns — a bank, a hospital, a university — erected in what felt to me like a nullity, the flat land stamped with cloud shadows. For years I had clung to the idea of India as a rip cord of a kind: Should everything go to hell in America — should the idea of growing old here become too fearful, too expensive, too lonely — I could always go back to the protections of India and the ready-made community of my childhood. But after 2019, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government stripped me of my Indian citizenship and banned me from the country I had grown up in after I wrote an article critical of his re-election, I had to look squarely at the possibility that America was the country I would die in. It forced me to confront what it meant to set down roots here — 'to unpack,' as my husband always implored me to do — and to come to terms with the continent of a country across the river from my apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. All around me now, city was succumbing to prairie — the corn was high, the soy solid gold in the fields — but I was jittery. I imagined I was thirsty. Did I need to pee? I didn't have the right cable to connect my phone to the car. I had to get off the Interstate to breathe and assess. When I saw signs for Dwight, Ill., proud of its place as a stopover on Route 66, I veered right. At the Texaco filling station, with its red gas pumps redolent of Edward Hopper's roadside nocturne, 'Gas' (1940), I met Scott Sand and his wife, Maureen, volunteer local tour guides. The 1920s had turned America into a motoring nation. In a single decade, the number of cars grew from 8 million to 23 million. In 1921, Congress passed the Federal Aid Highway Act, which set in motion the creation of a network of roads covering the entire country. Started in 1926, Route 66 would eventually offer more than 2,400 miles of paved road from Michigan Avenue in Chicago to the Santa Monica Pier in California. It acquired a hallowed place in popular culture almost immediately. It is the road that the Joads, the Depression-era family in John Steinbeck's novel 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1939), embark down. It was also the road that the artist Ed Ruscha took when he moved from Oklahoma to California, and that he paid tribute to in some of his most striking works, such as 'Standard Station' (1966), which captures the luminous sky over Amarillo. When I explained to Scott and Maureen that I was from New Delhi and had set out upon Route 66, they looked flabbergasted, dropping the Californians they were showing around for the extravagant stranger in their midst. Scott walked me over to a map in the gas station and had me plant a yellow pin in New Delhi. I was annoyed to see that a blue pin had already beaten me to it. Maureen, seemingly still amazed at my sudden appearance, said, 'Here in Dwight, what we like to do is watch sports and vacuum.' I laughed, then confided my many worries to her, and she, soothing my nerves, directed me across the street to a shop where everything I needed was waiting for me: a Red Bull, a Gatorade, a phone cord that brought the screen of my car magically to life, allowing me the luxury of maps, audiobooks and playlists. These may seem like prosaic things, but they are the viscera of happiness on a road trip, and they transformed what had been a fraught first 90 minutes into something approaching the Sanskritic idea of a sadhana — a discipline, a practice, a meditative experience. I had wanted to use the lineaments of Route 66, with its rich tradition of detours, to reimagine the old cliché, exploring the meaning of rootedness and belonging in America. I wanted to preserve the ethos of a road trip, which meant that I couldn't stay long in any one place and that my conversations would have an element of chance about them. At the same time, this was not a romantic American road trip of beers drunk with strangers, of late nights and strip clubs, of not knowing where one might wake up. I was more interested in Americans' attitude toward history and how it informed their idea of home. I had always noticed a kind of breeziness in America's relationship to the past, a casual disregard, which I found at once unsettling and liberating. In other places where I had spent long periods of time — Britain, India, Europe and the Middle East — people stewed over history. They felt the future depended on their being able to resolve certain nodal points of tension in the past, whether it was the Islamic conquests of India or the pluck of Britain during the Blitz of the 1940s. This was simply not true in the United States. I had thought at first that it was a New World thing but, in Mexico and other parts of Latin America, I encountered a relationship to history's entanglements that was very similar to what I had known elsewhere. People were solaced and troubled by history in ways that the United States seemed to have no need for. Conversations here rarely led from the events of the day back to a defining event in the past. Yes, there were disputes over Confederate monuments and America's sins versus America's promise, but there was also a palpable impatience with history, as if people were afraid of its power to bog you down. The other side of that refusal to be burdened by the past was a tremendous sense of optimism. The outsider felt it immediately on arrival. Even first-generation Indian Americans struck us as different when they had grown up here. They were lighter, more innocent, their faces clearer somehow. We native Indians referred to them jokingly as A.B.C.D.s ('American-born confused desis'; 'desi' means 'of the country,' i.e., Indian or South Asian), but it was our own confusion that we were responding to — the confusion of seeing those who look like you but who seem a people apart on the inside. The absence of malice or cynicism, a willingness to trust others, was a world away from the internal suspicions of Indian society, where belonging was foisted on you whether you liked it or not. It was freeing to be in a place where one's future was not hostage to the past, but it also left me with a kind of blankness, as if I were no longer sure of what life amounted to. My sense of self had not been forged in a culture of achievement. The idea that I could be what I made of myself felt too thin an identity. The social self of centuries, formed at the confluence of region, class, caste and tribe, was still strong in me. Bereft of it, I had a fear of falling, of living without leaving a footprint. Back on the Interstate, steel farm buildings glistering in the sun, I began to reflect on my two days in Chicago, and how much they'd helped me crystallize my questions about the meaning of history in America. I had been haunted by the first sight of that magisterial city on Lake Michigan. A cold cloistered sea, half-teardrop, half-looking glass, with the odd white sail visible against the indifferent blue of its surface. It didn't let in the air like a real ocean but, with its deserted beaches, made the prairie town feel like a Baltic resort preparing for winter. I found the city forbidding yet mesmerizing: the dark towers overlooking the water, with its fringe of tawny grass, the shaftlike streets full of shadow. 'Lying at the southern end of the Great Lakes — 20 percent of the world's supply of fresh water — Chicago,' writes Bellow in 'Humboldt's Gift' (1975), 'with its gigantesque outer life contained the whole problem of poetry and the inner life in America. Here you could look into such things through a sort of freshwater transparency.' IN CHICAGO, I'D gone first to the Chicago History Museum to meet the director of exhibitions, Paul Durica. 'It didn't just grow faster than any city in America,' he said, but, to the best of his knowledge, 'it grew faster than any city in the history of humanity.' What had started as little more than a fort, and then a fur-trade outpost, chartered in 1837 with a population of a few thousand, Durica explained, had become the fifth-largest city in the world by 1900. A waterway connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi had been completed as early as 1848, but the technology that truly gave Chicago its advantage, the railways, also came to town that year. Chicago became the junction of America, with 39 different railroads running through the city. Raw goods, from Minnesota timber to Wisconsin lard, poured into the Midwestern hub and were pumped out to a hungry nation beyond. If Los Angeles was the dream factory, Chicago was the city of hard material reality. My affection for Bellow made me want to see his old neighborhood of Humboldt Park. Reading his 'Chicago Book' — among his papers at the University of Chicago, which he worked on through the mid-1970s — I had been struck by his sorrow that the place where he spent much of his childhood had, by the 1960s, lost its Eastern European character. Already in his time it had begun to be part of what would become Puerto Rico Town, or Paseo Boricua, and it was with a Chicago-born Puerto Rican poet that I wandered through the streets Bellow had grown up in. Eduardo Arocho, 54, wore a shirt embroidered down the front. He, too, suffered over questions of roots and belonging. Pointing to a mural of the fierce folkloric specter of a vejigante draped in the Puerto Rican flag, he asked, 'Do you notice something different about it?' I looked closely and saw that a lone Puerto Rican farmer, or jibaro, was standing between a man with a can of white paint and a laborer laying white bricks marked with dollar signs at the edge of the mural. 'He's resisting erasure,' Arocho said. 'Every time we moved,' he added, referring to the many upheavals his community in Chicago had undergone, 'we noticed that the place we had left got richer, and we got poorer.' As he spoke, I realized how essential stasis, the simple act of staying put in one place for a long time, was to the tenacity of history. I thought of my ancestors in villages in Punjab, where pestilence was rife, who had sent their children away to safety — my paternal grandfather, in fact — even as they had made a solemn vow not to leave their place. Conquest, war, famine and death, disease and pogroms had been the driving forces behind the great migrations in Europe, Asia and Africa. America had brought into the world an agent of displacement no less profound than what antiquity had known — the raw power of capitalism. It had scraped the land clean of generation after generation. On a side street of this old Eastern European neighborhood, I caught a glimpse of the Star of David in the circular transom of a building that had once been a Black church and was now a Puerto Rican school. I had seen such scenes in Europe and the Middle East, but there they were the aftermath of a violent event in which Jews had been forced to flee. Here no cataclysm had occurred. These were just the peacetime convulsions of American life. BUBBLE-HEADED WATER tanks in baby blue announcing the names of Southern Illinois towns now pierced a horizon of cornfields as dark and withered as tobacco. I was halfway to St. Louis, not far from Peoria. 'How will it play in Peoria?' my husband would always joke when he felt I was drifting into abstraction. The insistence on common sense in America, with its echo in Donald Trump's rhetoric, had a peculiar moral dimension, almost as if the cultural health and vigor of this society depended on its not succumbing to the decadence of the Old World. The implication was that effete Europe could afford extravagances of thought, language and action, whereas here in settler America, brass tacks and pragmatism must prevail, otherwise the whole project, this wild enterprise of bringing a nation into being half a planet away, might slip through one's fingers. Success here came at the price of shrugging off life's attachments as if they were weaknesses, including the attachment to place. In describing America as 'a rootless Elysium' in his 1948 book 'America and Cosmic Man,' the British writer Wyndham Lewis writes, 'No American worth his salt should go looking around for a root. … For is not that tantamount to giving up the most conspicuous advantage of being American, which is surely to have turned one's back on race, caste and all that pertains to the rooted State?' But nearly 80 years later, in an election that was weeks away, blood and soil were on the ballot. The vice-presidential candidate JD Vance stressed that America was not just an idea, it was a homeland. 'People will not fight for abstractions,' he said at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, 'but they will fight for their home.' My husband's family in eastern Tennessee resembled Vance's on a sociological level. Which is to say, they stayed put in dire poverty for 150 years on the Georgia-Alabama border until the opening of a paper factory in the 1950s brought them to Tennessee. They were part of the paradox of an aging America. Here was a country that demanded movement, that fetishized the pioneering spirit, yet my family in South Asia had, during the 1947 partition of India, known far more upheaval within living memory than my husband's. It was also a country that, more than any other, was conceived as an idea, a country written into being, where now a century and a half of relative peace, prosperity and stability had created a relationship to place that more closely resembled the blood ties of the Old World. Ethnonationalism was in the air. The idea still stood — 'This is a country of immigrants,' people still said — but it was besieged on all sides by the realities of belonging. If Chicago was Bellow's 'dauntless tightrope walker who has never yet fallen,' St. Louis, once its mighty rival — the site of not only the 1904 World's Fair but also that year's Summer Olympics — had most definitely fallen. Walking down to the Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch on the Mississippi, lined with stately buildings of 10 and 12 stories in marble and terra cotta, some designed by the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan, I was unnerved by the air of general desolation. The lights at the Beaux-Arts Orpheum Theater had gone dark indefinitely in 2012. In the center of town, at a statue commemorating the German poet Friedrich Schiller, the city's destitute had gathered. On the Mississippi, where Mark Twain had once waited upriver for steamships from this city, all boat traffic had fallen silent. 'During the summer of 1904,' writes the historian Walter Johnson in 'The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States' (2020), 'St. Louis was not simply the hub of the nation's western empire — it was the center of the world.' But to be here now, 120 years later, was to be reminded of V.S. Naipaul's description of a Congolese outpost in his 1979 novel, 'A Bend in the River': 'a place where the future had come and gone.' That evening, under low lights at a restaurant called Brasserie by Niche, Mary Jo Bang, a poet and English professor at Washington University and, most notably, a translator of Dante's 'Inferno,' told me of the precise moment when she realized that the St. Louis of her childhood had ceased to exist. She'd grown up in a segregated city in the 1950s. As a young woman, she had wanted nothing so much as to get away. And for years she had, living in London and New York. Then in 2000, a few years before losing her son to drug addiction, Bang found herself tugged as if by an invisible cord back to the city. One day, not long after her return, she suggested to her mother, who was still living in St. Louis, that they go downtown and make a girls' day of it. 'What downtown?' her mother said. 'There's no downtown left.' At the old Union Station, with its barrel-vaulted ceiling of light pastels, stained glass and gold leaf, they were holding logistics conferences. Once the busiest train station in the world, with some of the first electric lights, it now accommodated a hotel and a few restaurants. 'It's so calm, so deserted,' said a Pakistani attendee from Dubai, unsettled by the quiet of the ghost town beyond. 'I haven't got a lot of time left,' Bang said with equanimity. 'I can't spend it thinking about St. Louis.' Now in her late 70s, she described her life in her hometown as something akin to a residency. 'My life is the life of the mind.' The next morning, before setting out on the nearly 400-mile drive to Tulsa, I stopped at Lafayette Park in St. Louis to see the statue of Thomas Hart Benton, the early 19th-century U.S. senator from Missouri. In an 1849 speech at a railroad convention, Benton had implored his country to fulfill Christopher Columbus's dream of reaching India through a westward expansion that would turn the new country into a Pacific power. Westward, ho! The dream had been realized, but St. Louis was left stranded by history. And how strange it was for me, an Indian who had come as a migrant to America, to stand in that park on an October morning before the statue of a dead visionary in a toga, reading this testament to his hubris and rapacity: 'There is the East. There is India.' 'ROUTE 66 ITSELF is vexed,' Bang had said, 'because it was part of the Trail of Tears,' referring to the forced migration, starting in the 1830s, of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Seminole and other tribes to what would become Oklahoma. I had seen an exhibition of the Midwestern artist Andrea Carlson at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Carlson, who has Ojibwe ancestry, was critical of projects precisely like Route 66 and the way they cut through the land, erasing Native American places of worship while fetishizing tepees and such. They altered our gaze, seeming to cast 'Native folk' into the past, she said. One of Carlson's sculptures, 'The Surveyor's Obstacle,' represents a holy place standing in the way of an infrastructure project, not unlike Route 66, that threatened to demolish it. When I spoke to Carlson, she described Route 66 as 'a scar across the continent.' It was part of a 'narrative of triumphalism,' she said, in which the complex network of trade routes and highways that Native people had used to make a whole of this vast continent were disrupted and effaced. This was the country, she reminded me, where a mere girl like Sacagawea could lead two white explorers from present-day North Dakota to the Pacific Coast, yet a project like Route 66 was designed to make the land seem trackless and unexplored, and therefore ripe for the taking. The land after St. Louis began to feel empty, but I had to remind myself, through strenuous mental effort, as I drove out of autumn into summer, fall foliage giving way to burnt yellow grass, that the land was not empty; it had been emptied. The German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, who moved to America in 1940 and, not long after, made a journey west, writes that he felt that he was traveling through 'an extinct star … never peopled by human beings.' But this was not true. The land had been unpeopled, desacralized and written over, the old inhabitants separated from their holy places. Arriving in Tulsa some six hours later, I felt an awful emptiness rise up in me. The old oil town, with its beige parking garages that form a girdle around nondescript towers in gray and black — Bank of Oklahoma, Cherokee Federal — was exactly the kind of American city that filled me with dread. There's something about such a city set down in a wilderness to which it bears no organic relationship that seems to invite ruin, producing a feeling of nowhereness in me that I couldn't banish. 'The shortcoming of the American landscape,' the German dialectician Theodor Adorno writes in 'Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life' (1951), his meditation on exile in the United States, 'is not … the absence of historical memories, as that it bears no traces of the human hand ... no marks of foot or wheel, no soft paths along their edges.' He adds, 'It is as if no one has ever passed their hand over the landscape's hair. It is uncomforted and comfortless.' When I told Luke Leifeste, a New York boomerang who had returned to his hometown, how Tulsa made me feel, he suggested that I 'lean into that feeling.' We sat in Guthrie Green in the Tulsa Arts District, a low-lying island of restaurants, bars and galleries in old warehouses. The Green was one of the first of many projects that the George Kaiser Family Foundation, endowed by money from oil and gas, had invested in as part of a philanthropic-dollar-fueled revival of the city. 'This whole area was barren,' Leifeste said, casting his gaze around streets I had walked through the evening before as a haunting aureate light broke over Tulsa from under a dark bank of clouds. 'There was a Spaghetti Warehouse and a bunch of empty parking lots.' Now, in addition to the restaurants, the city housed the archives of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, which the foundation had secured with the aim of making Tulsa an important cultural destination. Leifeste was in his 30s — blond, gay, handsome — and his enthusiasm was infectious. Back in New York, he'd felt his sense of self becoming hostage to his job as a magazine editor. It had taken an ego death moment with a life coach for him to return to live in the town that he had meant to turn his back on. Seeing the city through his eyes, I began to feel embarrassed by my Old World impulse to privilege roots over the industry of men and women for whom belonging was an achievement, not to be taken for granted. The settler spirit, much derided now, represented an awesome ability. Not every people can arrive in a place half a world away and set up a functioning society. The ahistoricism of such a society, no less than its sense of possibility, filled someone such as myself with a curious mixture of horror and fascination. Yet I wonder why I did not feel that way in great swaths of the Arabized world, say, or even in Latin America. There, too, new roots had been set down over old, but somehow the graft had taken better. In the United States, one felt something closer to a scorched-earth relationship with the people and culture that came before. The violence that must attend so clean a break between the new and old inhabitants of a place invariably leaves a mark on the character of both groups. Perhaps it was this that I was responding to, almost as if I had walked into a room where something terrible had occurred, which could be inferred only from how assiduously the room had been cleaned. Oil had built Tulsa but, beginning in the 1920s and '30s, the efforts of educators such as Alice Robertson, one of the first women elected to Congress, turned the city into one of the great archival centers of the world. Robertson donated her personal library related to Native American history to the University of Tulsa. This was the foundation to which provosts and presidents added over the course of the 20th century, making Tulsa a major literary repository. I had heard the name of the city in India, long before I could have found it on a map, because it was where the papers of some of the writers I loved most — Naipaul, James Joyce, Jean Rhys and Rebecca West — were archived. By the 1980s, oil production had become less feasible and, in 2011, the Petroleum Club shut its doors but, in the meantime, institutional wealth from oil was being reinvested in the decaying city to help revivify it. The largest private gift to a community in the history of the United States resulted in the 2018 opening of the Gathering Place, a hundred acres of stunning greenery along the Arkansas River designed by the landscape architecture firm Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, which also designed Brooklyn Bridge Park. New restaurants with acclaimed chefs had sprung up, and a New York University off-site campus opened this spring in the Tulsa Arts District. Tulsa Pride was that weekend, and the queer collective Studio 66 was throwing a party. 'It's where Studio 54 meets Route 66,' Leifeste said with a laugh. This Tulsa Renaissance, as Leifeste put it, belied an older, darker history. His alma mater, Booker T. Washington High School, served as a Red Cross field hospital after the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Each of the cities I had been in so far — East St. Louis, Ill., in 1917; Chicago in 1919 — had experienced a wave of racial hatred following the northward movement of Black people escaping the Jim Crow South. In Tulsa, because of treaties signed between Native tribes and the Union following the Civil War, formerly enslaved Black people knew a level of freedom that was a world away from the post-Reconstruction South. 'Here was a place,' writes Victor Luckerson in 'Built From Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street' (2023), 'where three-quarters of Black farmers owned their acreage and more than 80 percent of Black people could read — a higher literacy rate than any state in the South.' Luckerson describes the Black population of Oklahoma (which did not become a state until 1907) as trebling between 1900 and 1920, with some people even making the trek there by foot. Black theaters and small businesses flourished. A whole bourgeoisie of lawyers and doctors came into being. The affront that such a world posed to old racial attitudes in the South led to one of the great American atrocities. On May 31, 1921, a white mob stormed the neighborhood that had come to be known as Black Wall Street. They plundered, burned and destroyed 35 city blocks, killing as many as 300 people, including a beloved doctor. Black Wall Street never fully recovered. What gave the violence its special edge was that it had been designed to break the spirit of those who had risen above their station. It would be self-regarding and disingenuous to believe that any of this history, in either its magnitude or its cruelty, is particular to America. But what is particular to America is the wish for history not to matter, for it to be devoid of consequence. In Mexico, in India, in Germany and Japan, people know they live in the aftermath of what those who went before them wrought. Here, in certain communities — African American, Jewish, Indigenous and Asian — history feels real, but the country as a whole projects an innocence that feels false. 'Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection,' writes James Baldwin in 'Notes of a Native Son' (1955), 'and to transform their moral contradictions ... into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.' Baldwin feels that such a response in the face of violence has to be a posture, an outright lie or a willful evasiveness. It's what makes him want to rob his white countrymen of 'the jewel of [their] naïveté,' to grab them by the lapels and drag them kicking and screaming before the mirror of history and have them look and see what they truly are. 'Not everything that is faced can be changed,' Baldwin tells us in a 1962 essay, 'but nothing can be changed until it is faced.' Yet having grown up in a society robbed of its illusions, I always marveled at America's need to be not merely prosperous and powerful but good. If and when the day comes (and it may already have) that America lets go of that belief in itself as a moral force in the world, many will breathe a collective sigh of relief, but just as many will mourn the loss of a fiction that gave this country its tremendous capacity for self-improvement and the sense of perfectibility that drew me here, away from the weariness of societies laden with history. AS THE FULL immensity of the West opened up around me (the speed limit was now 80 miles per hour), I found it harder to hold on to my old moorings. In Foss, Okla., halfway between Tulsa and Amarillo, I pulled off the road. I had for a long time now been seeing road signs in Gurmukhi, the liturgical language of the Sikhs. My mother is Sikh. The community, perhaps because of its martial and agrarian origins, as well as a fierce sense of autonomy, plays an outsize role in trucking and transport in India and North America alike. (Some 30,000 Sikhs have joined the North American trucking industry in just the past four years.) At last my curiosity got the better of me, and Exit 53 off Interstate 40 delivered me to the door of a traditional Indian truck stop restaurant called Preet Dhaba. Face-to-face with Satnam Singh, a striking Sikh in his 20s from Gurdaspur, in the North Indian state of Punjab, I almost blurted out, 'What are you doing here?' We were standing, countryman to countryman, in an Oklahoma town so small there was a gas station and practically nothing else. 'My brother came first,' he said, 'and I followed because there was work.' In Punjab, where drugs and unemployment are rife, the opportunity to come to the United States must have seemed like something of a lifeline to Satnam. It brought to mind a scene in one of my favorite driving books: 'Travels With Charley: In Search of America' (1962) by John Steinbeck, which I had reread before this journey. 'One of our most treasured feelings concerns roots,' Steinbeck writes, 'growing up rooted in some soil or some community.' Meeting with residents of mobile homes in Ohio, he asks the inhabitant of one whether he would not feel bereft of these things. 'My father came from Italy,' the man answers, 'He grew up in Tuscany in a house where his family had lived maybe a thousand years. That's roots for you, no running water, no toilet, and they cooked with charcoal or vine clippings. ... I bet if you gave my old man the choice he'd cut his roots and live like this.' Satnam Singh's old man now appeared in the gas station in a turban, his white beard and mustache in a net. Two brothers and a father, far from home but grateful to be where opportunity lay. These streams of immigration have long been the most moving aspect about the United States. People arrived with the smallest of expectations. They wanted jobs and the assurance of making their way free of corrupt officials or a Byzantine bureaucracy. The clean reliability of Anglo-Saxon law historically made nations like Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States the most appealing destinations, for no one is more aware of the intricacies of economy, rights and law than immigrants whose lives depend on them. In addition, the United States offered something else: participation in a national culture that was, at least on the face of it, unthreatened by hyphenation. That Satnam's children could be Sikh Americans or Indian Americans while supporting the Oklahoma Sooners is so replicable a fact of American life that we forget how powerful it is and, like all complex, beautiful things, easily broken but hard to recover. Most countries offer no path to belonging. Those that do either offer partial states of inclusion or require you to forgo your past. In America, by contrast, cultural fluency is attainable within a generation. The elasticity of America's frame of belonging is so remarkable a feature of life here that, even under assault, rumor of it would have reached Satnam's family in far-off Gurdaspur. WHEN I CROSSED into Texas, the horizons widened. Windmills appeared in the distance. There were tractors with strips of floodlights mowing vast medians full of wild grass. Landscape is like architecture. One does not need to enter it; one is affected by it involuntarily and, in that moment, I was hollowed out by the sheer scale of what it must mean as an American to carry this country in one's head. Up until this point, some modicum of residual familiarity, related to the East Coast — not topography but scale — had remained with me. Now I, who had traveled the length and breadth of Morocco, India, Uzbekistan and Mongolia, found myself confronted by a featureless enormity the likes of which I had never known before. It was like stepping out of a parish church into a cathedral. The mind could not process what the eye beheld — it was as if no human enterprise could survive the flattening power of nature. My driving had changed too. I had left Chicago clinging to the steering wheel, my eyes darting left and right. My husband had spoken to me of the yogic nature of driving, but it was nothing I had ever known myself. I drove like a flightless bird on an open plain, afraid to be caught in the talons of something bigger. But after Amarillo, where I bought underwear and T-shirts at a Texas-size Target and began to live out of the trunk of my car, I relaxed into the landscape. This truly was the sort of place where you could watch your dog run away for three days. I let it empty me out from within, and I began to enjoy myself. It's not always the case that the reality of a place lives up to one's imagined idea of what it would be, but America was ravishing even before one got to its fabled landscapes. There was such a frightening poetry to those evening drives, when a band of volcanic orange lay in compacted silence at the base of an indigo dome of sky studded with a single star. BY THE TIME I reached New Mexico, the first outcroppings of red rock pushing their way out of the thin grass, flat-topped plateaus with furrowed bases, I began to see Native Americans at nearly every stop — at gas stations, at trading posts off the highway, at shops in Santa Fe, at bars and restaurants. In Taos, occasionally catching the eye of a figure with aquiline features and long graying hair, I was knocked sideways by the sheer implication of indigeneity in a country like America. Having not ventured west before, I had never encountered Native Americans in this way. My first thought was that surely these were not people for whom America was a rootless Elysium. Their relationship to the land must have been as integral and direct as mine to India. Then I began to wonder about the line between the Indigenous and the settler in the United States. Was I making too much of it? God knows I had seen it at work in other societies. I had seen the old inhabitants (adivasis) of pre-Hindu India treated as outcastes, falling prey to poverty and alcoholism. I had seen an Arab in Morocco look with some combination of wonder and disdain at Indigenous Berber culture, with its animism. But what makes the American situation unique is not the history but the gaze of the settler — that mixture of fetishization and disregard with which they treat Native Americans. Has any country been quite so successful in effacing a people through the ubiquity of their representation on stamps, in schoolboy games and on billboards for tourist destinations along Route 66? Andrea Carlson, the artist, described certain slogans of the American creed — 'This is a land of immigrants,' 'a land of opportunity,' 'the American dream' — as being hurtful but conceded that settlers did not necessarily intend them as such. It was what they had to tell themselves in order to feel innocent. One cannot make history matter. It either sticks in your gut or it doesn't. In that sense, it operates by a logic closer to art than to politics or religion. 'The black man, as a man,' Baldwin tells us in 'Notes of a Native Son,' 'did not exist for Europe. But in America, even as a slave, he was an inescapable part of the general social fabric and no American could escape having an attitude toward him.' This was history that kept people up at night. One could feel the filamental power of that drama every day in America, but the same was not true of Native Americans. They were, in a sense, the first casualties of the frivolity of the American approach to history. Their pain, their reality, not to mention their bond with the land, had been turned into a plaything of American mythmaking. Carlson marveled at the success of American cinema at putting audiences in sympathy with cowboys besieged by 'Indians,' even when they were so transparently the aggressors. Listening to her describe Native Americans as encircled by narrative, I felt they had been trivialized by a culture devoid of a sense of tragedy. The next morning, my discomfort grew. I went with the travel writer and photographer Chris Wallace, who was at an artists' retreat in Taos, to Taos Pueblo. At first glance, it was like a village in India, with its adobe houses, narrow stream, stray dogs and blue wood smoke. Jalen Kopepassah, a young woman of the Red Willow people, was leading a group of white tourists on what I can only say felt like a human safari. Kopepassah explained that many of her people practiced 'a dual' religion: They were at once adherents of their traditional faith and Catholics, keeping the two as discrete streams of belief. I had seen various kinds of composite religion in Bolivia and, more recently, in Japan. What I had not seen was this singularly American moment, where a living link to the pre-Columbian past leads the descendants of those who supplanted her on a tour of her homeland. When later I asked Kopepassah if it was strange for her to show settlers around her ancestral land, she said she saw it as an opportunity to educate them about her community, but that her connection to the land, reinforced through song, dance and ritual, was completely different from that of other Americans. 'We're deeply rooted in this place,' she said. 'People have been coming here to settle now for centuries but, for us, it's just our home.' In other societies, including those of Latin America, the line between conqueror and conquered has, through language, intermarriage and the exchange of customs and food, been partially effaced. In America, that line feels as real as the day John Cabot set foot on the North American continent. Kopepassah spoke of how her people lived in fear of more of their land being taken away. 'Because of the cultural genocide,' she said, 'and because of how much we've lost since the Spanish came to this area, it has affected a lot of our people to this day.' All conquered peoples, from Hindu India to pre-Islamic Persia and Indigenous America, live with the pain of an irrecoverable past but, in the United States, that treasured human need for roots had been suppressed by an inhuman injunction to steel oneself against such sentimentality. I could think only of India, the dream of which had been the ostensible cause of all this madness. It was like a historical case of mistaken identity. I felt almost responsible to be from the country that had whetted the appetites of Europeans. And now here I was, among those who had fallen in my stead. What had protected us, and not them? The sheer force of numbers? Viral immunity? Had things been different, would the remainder of my people be giving Englishmen tours of our villages? I WAS MOVING fast now through the places they had found instead of ours, on the open road, through Colorado's forests of rock, aspen and cedar. Occasionally the horizon would swing into view, and I would see sunlit, shrub-covered mountains, or open plains ripped through by a saw-toothed canyon. In Utah, the landscape grew more dramatic. It was a topography beyond compare, a Mars-scape of primordial pillars of red rock rising up to meet a rain-filled sky. There were ferric hillocks of oxidized green and chasms that tore through flat earth, at the bottom of which a ribbon of river caught the sunlight. I had grown up in a society where an earth religion was active, and I knew instinctively that Native Americans would have had a sacerdotal relationship with this special geography. As I drove through the national parks that encompass what would once have been part of a cosmology, land inscribed with meaning, now by Ute people, now Paiute, I began to miss those older voices. The land felt unmarked. It was like seeing the Himalayas or the Andes shorn of their religious significance. Crossing into Arizona via Monument Valley, I was granted a glimpse of how some of the Indigenous now lived. Towns like Kayenta and Tuba City were among the most wretched I had ever seen. All the hallmarks of American poverty — bad food, obesity and urban blight — coalesced in an apocalyptic scene of destitution and vagrancy. Only a short drive away, through a forest of blond grass and juniper, the riches of American suburbia could be found in Flagstaff, but here, under a bruised sky, clouds of dust blew over scenes of tires strewn over red earth, some partially buried as if in an obstacle course; there were car graveyards and abandoned motels. Brave slogans, spray-painted over shuttered businesses, read 'Protect the Seed' and 'Land Back.' My phone told me it was Indigenous Peoples' Day. When I asked Carlson about the conditions I had seen in places like Tuba City and Kayenta, she reminded me that the only reason we moved peaceably through this great continent of a country was because of a set of treaties signed between Native Americans and colonists. 'Every treaty has been broken!' she said. If those treaties had been upheld, if Native American sovereignty had been respected, she believed we would not be seeing the kind of poverty I saw. 'It's the continual violence of the United States,' she said, 'and their continual occupation, of getting something without paying for it.' I BURST OUT of Arizona into Nevada, through the brown-painted hills of the Mojave Desert and into California. I was answering a physical need to give a face to the names of certain places that were now imprinted on my mind: the bare, sunlit mountains of Nevada; the shimmering mirage of Las Vegas; the bleached decrepitude of the Inland Empire, a treeless island of asphalt and heavily tinted glass. These mental pictures settled my idea of America, my adoptive country, turning the abstract into reality. We think we know a place, in the same way we sometimes feel we have read certain famous novels, but there is no substitute for watching land go by. The stamina, endurance and, at times, monotony are not incidental to the experience; they are the point. They change us not for what we might later say about them but because we went through them, because we turned every page. I had driven some 2,900 miles in the past week and, on a misty afternoon in the eucalyptus-scented hills of Santa Barbara, all dark green and turmeric, I caught my first hazy glimpse of the Pacific Ocean. In California, I wanted to chase down the ghosts of old émigrés. I'd felt an immediate kinship with that wave of English and German artists, writers and musicians — Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg — who left Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s and went the additional 3,000 miles past New York to California. They must have come for reasons as concrete as nice weather and the job opportunities in Hollywood, but a part of me fancied they had come to be free of the past and for the illusion of a terra nullius that California offered. It sat on the frontier, an Eden of riches and fruit trees, exerting a creative power over the American imagination. It was a social laboratory where, even within the American context, the world was being imagined anew. The exiles did not want an imitation of Europe on the East Coast but wanted to turn their backs on the Old World once and for all. I imagined them relishing the feeling of standing at the edge of the West, having gone as far as it was possible to go, watching the sun sink over the Pacific. 'Once you get to the ocean,' the nun Pravrajika Vrajaprana said to me as we sat in the Santa Barbara bookshop of the Vedanta Society of Southern California, looking out on a day that refused to materialize, 'you have that sense of the infinite in front of you.' Dressed in a saffron shirt, her cropped hair white, she had greeted me earlier by saying, 'It's Joan Didion weather,' referring to the Santa Ana winds Didion had so famously written about in an essay in 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem' (1968): 'The winds show us how close to the edge we are.' They brought destruction to this part of the world in their role as an essential aliment to fire, which would erupt only months after my trip, burning to the ground so many of the places that I was to see for the first and last time. 'It's a place of extremes,' Vrajaprana said, looking up almost fearfully at the surrounding hills. 'It feels so lovely and kind here right now, until there's a fire.' If rootedness and belonging was my theme, I was in the right place. India had taken deep root in California. Indian spirituality, with its emphasis on the interconnectedness of life, was an important check on the hubris of American individualism and biblical notions of how the world had been given by God to man to have dominion over. California was also a land of plunder, a place where rampant capitalism had merged with unrealistic fantasy. 'Their dreams were yours, their dreams were mine,' sings the cast of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1993 musical, 'Sunset Boulevard,' about those greedy gold rush pioneers in their covered wagons, 'but in those dreams were hidden dragons.' In a place where dreams of stupendous wealth and fame routinely turn to ash, I wondered if Indian philosophy provides a special comfort. Vrajaprana pointed to the invasive eucalyptus ('It turns into a bomb when there's a fire'), comparing it unfavorably with the indigenous scrub oak, which grows back and protects, then to the Southern Indian-inspired Vedanta Temple, designed by Lutah Maria Riggs in the 1950s, which — unlike the former Jesuit building downhill — observes the contours of the land, using pine telephone poles as pillars. What she kept hinting at was the tension between what makes one transplantation a success, another a failure. California is all possibility, all freedom, a place where old roots can find new soil. Vrajaprana has been a nun for 48 years. Her guru, Swami Prabhavananda, was also Isherwood's guru. ('Chris would say, 'He has a smile that makes people weep,'' she told me.) When I asked her about the appeal of California for men like Isherwood, she said it was not unlike what had brought her parents from Wisconsin to the state in the 1940s: 'It was the idea of not having people breathing down your neck, of being able to choose a philosophy that you could live with, of not being judged by an unhappy past, by an unhappy tradition that made you miserable.' Why was Jesus a Californian?, goes the old joke. He wore sandals, never cut his hair and started a cult of his own. I had expected to find the spiritual element in California, especially when it came to India, a touch absurd, but the state, I began to see, was a place in space and time reserved for the American imagination to wander, to quest. If the pioneering spirit needed to be pragmatic in the Midwest, creating the conditions for prosperity, it was allowed a certain latitude here at the edge of things. And as much as Indian spirituality was a check on American excesses, American ideas of feminism and equality had created an improved practice of Indian religion. India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, first proposed an International Day of Yoga in 2014, but nothing Modi achieved from doing downward dog in front of television cameras could compete with what California had done for yoga. This was the laboratory, but it was also the megaphone through which spiritual experiments, ranging from meditation and exercise to ethical choices about food, were broadcast urbi et orbi. It was possible here to witness the creative possibilities of an old idea reimagined through contact with new soil. Just as Islam had once absorbed Greek philosophy, or Japan Buddhism, the Californian assimilation of Eastern religion was exhilarating. At a time when conventional religion was in retreat, here was a place where the essence of Indian spiritual thought, which is inquiry, was still very much alive. ON MY PENULTIMATE day in California, having deposited my rental car in Santa Monica, I found myself at the house of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg drinking Viennese kaffee mit schlag and eating Sacher torte with his descendants. When I mentioned how Mann, visiting Schoenberg in the 1940s, had complimented the quality of the coffee in this house, the composer's son Ronald said, 'It was about the only nice thing he said.' Mann had articulated the danger rootedness could pose to the individual, especially the artist. 'But ultimately, what today is the meaning of foreign, the meaning of homeland?' he asked rhetorically at his brother Heinrich's birthday party in Santa Monica in 1941. 'When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland.' In California, Mann lived the divided life of an exile, of which his house in Los Angeles was itself a metaphor — a white modern home furnished in old European style, interior and exterior breathing quietly next to each other, never becoming one. Having taken U.S. citizenship in 1944, Mann left the country for Switzerland in 1952 after an unpleasant experience at the hands of the House Un-American Activities Committee, fearing that a similar evil to the one he had seen in Germany would soon take hold in his adoptive country. Sitting with the Schoenbergs — Ronald, his wife, Barbara, both in their 80s, and their son Randol — I was struck by how happy they seemed, even as they regaled me with often abject stories of German exiles in Los Angeles. They griped, quibbled, joked, interrupted and talked over one another, as all families do, and in that room, heavily furnished in Viennese style, with the composer's chair in the corner, they raised the spirits of those who had been part of what has been described as Weimar on the Pacific. Everyone walked through that door, from writers such as Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Adorno to the composers Igor Stravinsky, Erich Korngold, Hanns Eisler and Alma Mahler. They told me how Barbara would pick the kids up from school, honking the car horn to the rhythm of Schoenberg's Second String Quartet. Ronald remembered how his father, teaching music to students on Sundays, would pause to answer the phone, wanting to know how his son was doing at tennis. They were seemingly ordinary family tales of rivalries and games, of early love affairs and streetcars ridden to Hollywood to see the movies, of Shirley Temple living across the street; but every now and then, the mood grew heavy. Ronald recalled how his father, no doubt shielding him from an identity that had proved fatal in the Old World, never told him he was Jewish. 'It was a mistake,' Ronald said, the resentment still fresh in him after all these years. 'I felt cheated.' Barbara, who was also the daughter of a Viennese composer, Eric Zeisl, recalled how she had been unable to move forward as a young woman, unable to marry Ronald, until she went to Vienna for a few months to confront the past. 'I just felt that I had to go back to my roots.' THE SCHOENBERGS, WHO would lose tens of thousands of the composer's scores to the fires that engulfed Los Angeles in January, had suggested I return to my hotel in Downtown L.A. along Ocean Avenue, past Palisades Park. That is where the exiles used to gather, an island of greenery in an asphalt desert. The afternoon light over the Pacific had turned the tall trunks of palms to shadow, the people to silhouettes. 'It's the end of the West,' Randol said. Here the road ran out; here a man could live with the illusion of being free of history. California was the dream not just for immigrants but for Americans too. Many in California, for a variety of reasons, from catastrophic climate events to homelessness, now spoke of how the dream had soured. The new frontiers were Texas and Florida, or perhaps Greenland and Mars. How strange that in a country so big people should have to carry in their heads the abstract idea of a world elsewhere. To me, like the imperative to be the shining city upon a hill, this need for a frontier felt religious. The anticipation of a world grown stale, the rot of what America had left behind ever ready to encroach, was of a piece with the puritan hunger for utopia. It demanded that a few bold spirits, ready to endure every privation and hardship, abandon this world, not worth the saving, and set out again to establish a new and purer society elsewhere. It was a kind of Noachian madness, but who could deny it was as American as a cordless leaf blower? My own journey had been a reckoning with how America might be the final frontier for me. I had indulged the fear of dying in a foreign country without the ghosts of kith and kin around me. But the world (old and new) is always in motion. Delhi, where I felt so at home, was a city of refugees where my family had come in living memory from what is today Pakistan after the 1947 partition of India. We put so much store by having spent a long time in one place, but we are made by our convulsions. A private convulsion had brought me to the United States, but I was a fool to fetishize the idea of home. I would have hated growing old among the drab certainties of a city like Delhi, where you could never be less than you were, but never more either. I was lucky to have landed in a country with a long tradition of making room for newcomers, and I had every reason to feel it would make room for me too. Watching the westering sun turn this other sea into a plate of molten platinum, I knew a great sense of calm. One of the beauties of travel is its power to demystify. I had let my fears about the enormity of America prey on my mind. I had stewed over the loss of moorings, history, a place in the world. Somewhere I must have known that the only armor against abstractions is reality — because, in the end, I conquered my dread of the frontier in that most American of ways. I hit the road.
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
If the West is to survive, the radicalism in our universities must be expunged
It was the American novelist Saul Bellow who observed that 'a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep'. In his day, the federal government had clamped down on those educated fools of the academy to force them to drop their discrimination against black students. Today, the world's wealthiest university is doing all it can to resist measures designed to protect the Jews. Harvard is reportedly suing the Trump administration after it froze $2.2 billion of the school's funding in the wake of the hounding of Jewish students during Gaza protests. The administration accused the university of being 'more committed to activism than scholarship'. Quite reasonably, Trump demanded that Harvard 'cease all preferences based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin'; take steps to ensure 'viewpoint diversity'; and conduct an audit of the programmes that 'most fuel antisemitic harassment'. Funding was frozen after the university refused. The brewing legal punch-up between the commissars at Harvard, who sit upon an endowment fund of over $50 billion and an operating budget of $6.4 billion, and the gigantic crude instrument of Donald Trump speaks volumes about the moral squalor of universities and the struggle for the soul of the West. Ironic, isn't it, that the university that restricted admission to Jews in the 1920s, leading other American and Canadian universities to follow suit, should be galvanised to such fierce resistance when required to protect them? Some education. But then, such are the self-referential comforts of academia that many emperors strut around with no clothes. The repulsively smug former Harvard president, Claudine Gay, who memorably told a congressional committee that calling for the genocide of Jews only qualifies as harassment 'depending on the context', was forced to resign after she was accused of plagiarism and failed to properly handle anti-Semitism on campus. Enter the Donald. The power and glory of the Trump approach, which cares little for comfortable niceties, may be toe-curling to certain sensibilities. But this is precisely what is required to break the status quo. And on this,Trump has morality on his side. For decades, Ivy League colleges incubated the kind of abstruse, anti-Western ideology that seemed laughably fringe at the time but ended up taking us all for fools. The father of critical race theory, Derrick Bell, spent many years at Harvard. The shameful protests in London over the weekend, which saw grown adults in ridiculous clothing waving placards bearing such charming slogans as 'the only good Terf is a dead Terf', is a direct inheritance of American queer theorists of the late 20th century, to whom I was enthusiastically introduced while studying English at Oxford. The Israelophobia that now infects the bien-pensant is also the shameful legacy of ideas first incubated in American and French universities. People like the Palestinian-American author Edward Said and the revolutionary anti-colonialist Franz Fanon laid the ground for the anti-democratic radicalism that is now pumped out in various forms by any mouthpiece of the Left. The corrosive concept of 'intersectionality', coined by the UCLA professor and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, instructs all radical movements to make common cause with each other. Which returns us to the protests in London last weekend, at which activists chanted 'one struggle, one fight, Palestine, Trans rights' without seeing the internal contradictions of this statement. Education is society's lifeblood; this makes it all the more shameful when we turn a blind eye to the poison of anti-Semitism encouraged by institutions that should be spreading knowledge instead of hate. If the soul of the West is to survive the century, the ingrained radicalism found in many universities must be expunged. The cretins at Harvard have stooped so low that it falls to a man like Trump to school them, and I for one am here for it. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
If the West is to survive, the radicalism in our universities must be expunged
It was the American novelist Saul Bellow who observed that 'a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep'. In his day, the federal government had clamped down on those educated fools of the academy to force them to drop their discrimination against black students. Today, the world's wealthiest university is doing all it can to resist measures designed to protect the Jews. Harvard is reportedly suing the Trump administration after it froze $2.2 billion of the school's funding in the wake of the hounding of Jewish students during Gaza protests. The administration accused the university of being 'more committed to activism than scholarship'. Quite reasonably, Trump demanded that Harvard 'cease all preferences based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin'; take steps to ensure 'viewpoint diversity'; and conduct an audit of the programmes that 'most fuel antisemitic harassment'. Funding was frozen after the university refused. The brewing legal punch-up between the commissars at Harvard, who sit upon an endowment fund of over $50 billion and an operating budget of $6.4 billion, and the gigantic crude instrument of Donald Trump speaks volumes about the moral squalor of universities and the struggle for the soul of the West. Ironic, isn't it, that the university that restricted admission to Jews in the 1920s, leading other American and Canadian universities to follow suit, should be galvanised to such fierce resistance when required to protect them? Some education. But then, such are the self-referential comforts of academia that many emperors strut around with no clothes. The repulsively smug former Harvard president, Claudine Gay, who memorably told a congressional committee that calling for the genocide of Jews only qualifies as harassment 'depending on the context', was forced to resign after she was accused of plagiarism and failed to properly handle anti-Semitism on campus. Enter the Donald. The power and glory of the Trump approach, which cares little for comfortable niceties, may be toe-curling to certain sensibilities. But this is precisely what is required to break the status quo. And on this,Trump has morality on his side. For decades, Ivy League colleges incubated the kind of abstruse, anti-Western ideology that seemed laughably fringe at the time but ended up taking us all for fools. The father of critical race theory, Derrick Bell, spent many years at Harvard. The shameful protests in London over the weekend, which saw grown adults in ridiculous clothing waving placards bearing such charming slogans as 'the only good Terf is a dead Terf', is a direct inheritance of American queer theorists of the late 20th century, to whom I was enthusiastically introduced while studying English at Oxford. The Israelophobia that now infects the bien-pensant is also the shameful legacy of ideas first incubated in American and French universities. People like the Palestinian-American author Edward Said and the revolutionary anti-colonialist Franz Fanon laid the ground for the anti-democratic radicalism that is now pumped out in various forms by any mouthpiece of the Left. The corrosive concept of 'intersectionality', coined by the UCLA professor and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, instructs all radical movements to make common cause with each other. Which returns us to the protests in London last weekend, at which activists chanted 'one struggle, one fight, Palestine, Trans rights' without seeing the internal contradictions of this statement. Education is society's lifeblood; this makes it all the more shameful when we turn a blind eye to the poison of anti-Semitism encouraged by institutions that should be spreading knowledge instead of hate. If the soul of the West is to survive the century, the ingrained radicalism found in many universities must be expunged. The cretins at Harvard have stooped so low that it falls to a man like Trump to school them, and I for one am here for it.
