Many things would change among Americans if they were willing to accept that there is unhappiness on earth and that unhappiness is not a priori a crime.
p. 100
You could travel day by day in the same bus, across the same plain, and you'd arrive each evening in the same town, which would have a different name each time.
She is traveling through the United States the same year that Gus the Great was published, and she notices the swagger and confidence that is depicted in that novel. This is the victorious America, the heroic non-suffering America after World War II.
She also notices a lack of confidence beneath that has to do with a lack of self-will. She puts it better than I do, and I love her description of this peculiar emptiness. It reminds me of how important it it to take charge of one's one life. I have friends who are adept at this, but I am not, yet. I hope I may still learn.
p. 376
It's not just for economic reasons that there is no "craftsmanship" in America; even in the leisure activities of domestic life, they don't aim for superior quality: food is cooked and fruit is ripened as quickly as possible. In every area they rush for fear that the result will already by outdated the moment it's achieved. Cut off from the past and the future, the present has no thickness. Nothing is stranger to Americans than the idea of seeing the moment as a recapitulation of time, as a mirror of the eternal, and of anchoring themselves in it in order to grasp timeless truths or values. The contents of the moment seem to them as precarious as the moment itself. Because they don't acknowledge that truths and values are evolving, they don't know how to preserve them in the movement that surpasses them; they just deny them. History is a large cemetery here: men, works, and ideas die almost as soon as they are born. And every individual existence has a taste of death: from minute to minute, the present is merely an honorary past. It must constantly be filled with the new to conceal the curse it carries within it. That's why Americans love speed, alcohol, film "thrillings," and sensational news. They feverishly demand something more and, again, something more, never able to quell their restlessness. Yet here, as everywhere else, life repeats itself day after day, so people amuse themselves with gadgets, and lacking real projects, they cultivate hobbies. These manias allow them to pretend to take responsibility, by choice for their daily habits. Sports, movies, and comics all offer distractions. But in the end, people are always faced with what they wanted to escape: the arid basis of American life--boredom.
Boredom and solitude. It's been said a thousand times, and it's true: these people I rub shoulders with are alone. Because they are too eager to flee their original solitude, because they flee from themselves, they aren't truly in possession of themselves. So how can they give themselves? How can they receive? They are open and welcoming, they are capable of tenderness, passion, sentimentality, and cordiality, but they rarely know how to build a deep love or a lasting friendship. They are far from heartless, yet their relations remain superficial or cold. They are far from lacking vitality, spirit, and generosity, yet they don't know how to devote themselves to the project of their lives.
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