Charlie's blog

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon this collection of color slide reproductions from the 1930s and 40s (via Tumblr and the links on the left-hand side of our Travel Studies blog).  Beyond leading me down the road of Internet procrastination, these photos astonished me.  They are gorgeous and a rare insight into the past.  I didn’t even realize that color slide film existed in the 1930s and certainly don’t immediately associate it with any photos until its rise to artistic prominence in the 70s and 80s.  That is what made these images so stunning.  Not only do they give us more material with which to visually imagine the lives of America in the early twentieth century, but also they undermine our traditional envisioning of the era as a collection of dramatic black and white Dorothea Langue portraits.
 
The limitations of black and white photography exaggerate the emotional drama and desperation of the Depression era to the contemporary viewer.  They make us think of hardships past, an era different from our own.  We’ve romanticized the notion of black and white photography with feelings of nostalgia and beauty.  In a way, it seems difficult to relate to the time period in a way other than through this nostalgia since we are used to such colored contemporary visual culture.  It is for this reason that these color photos of the Depression seem so startling.  The medium seems anachronistic and surprises us.  The vivid colors of the contemporary reproductions from the slides don’t seem to belong to the scenes themselves; they are perhaps too vivid, or maybe too real.
 
These photos remind us that Americans in the 1930s saw their lives in color, not in melodramatic monochrome.  They at once give the photos an additional depth while expressing quotidian subject matter, not monumentalized in the styles of Lange and Evans.  They are something that seems more relatable to us today and show us exactly to what extent technology and communication affect our ways of seeing.  They are bizarre rarities, completely entrancing.  They make me think of the importance of collecting a variety of sources in examining the past and how many ways there are to look at things.
 
On a semi-related note: Color photos from Russia in the 1910s

Obviously, when choosing a WPA guide to peruse, I—like most everyone else—needed to find one for my home state--in my case, South Carolina.  It wasn’t in the database provided, but I suppose that’s what Google Books is for.
 
Reading through the 1941 pamphlet, I couldn’t help but have a bizarre near-déjà-vu experience of third-grade social-studies class, the year we only learned about South Carolina (a topic revived for eighth grade as well).  It is strange to relearn a lot of the forgotten, but important state history that I naïvely learned as a child, though perhaps without as critical of an eye as now.  I even learned things I had never heard before: the politics of the Upcountry vs. the Lowcountry and the moving of the capitol; that Spanish moss and the pineapple are in the same plant family (Bromeliads, in case you are wondering; also, am I stupid for not knowing that pineapples don’t grow on trees?!?!). 
 
But the Writers’ Project hoped that this would happen.  The introduction states almost immediately the duel function of the “Guide to the Palmetto State.”  It is meant for tourists embarking around the country, but also for South Carolinians to bolster their own state knowledge and pride (though the latter may already be taken care off—“South Carolinians are among the rare folk in the South who have no secret envy for Virginians.  They have a love for their own state which is a phalanx against all attacks of whatever order (3).”)  The WPA guides promote travel and cultural exchange, but also provide a sense of solidity and unity within each state.  It is still more exciting to read about our home states today because it reinforces a feeling of place, home, and culture within us, just as it would have to a 1940s reader.
 
I found this tension interesting because it complicates the purpose of the WPA guides.  How do they function within their respective states and within the nation as a whole?  The guide’s first section is titled “Who is the South Carolinian?” and attempts to typify and rationalize the social and cultural characteristics of South Carolinians—by this, of course, it is meant the white descendents of those who colonized the area, as is fairly directly mentioned in the “Indians” chapter of the guide.  It seems, however, that these descriptions of the “Upcountryman,” ‘Lowcountryman,” etc. are geared toward those who can place themselves within the social classifications, giving a sense of cultural heritage to things that perhaps seemed like common facts.
 
Our own looking back seems to be nostalgia for a childhood past, and there is something to be said for comfort, despite the endless fantasies and realities of mysterious places.  Perhaps, even for foreign states and countries, we search for the familiar in the exotic; travel is perhaps more about our own stories and relations and selves than the places we are experiencing.  I place myself into the descriptions of a South Carolina guide because of my upbringing in a way not too dissimilar from dreaming of a future vacation.  The guides make us feel at home in our own states and country, a perhaps alternate route to the mission of “finding the real America” we’ve been discussing throughout the course.

I used to have a map from Cracker Barrel on my wall.  It showed the United States, complete with little logos, marking each of the nearly 600 Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores and, for each location, the map provided an address and highway exit number so that you could easily plan out your vacation rest stops so as to eat a greasy pile of bacon, eggs, and biscuits’n’gravy for every possible meal until your return to actual home cookin’.
 
Until looking at the map, I didn’t really think about the fact that every single Cracker Barrel in the country is located directly off the interstate.  Bizarre—that’s really really weird when you think about it.  They are not located in cities or towns, but simply along a four-lane road.  James Agee, in “The American Roadside,” describes this roadside as a character in the paradigmatic American road trip.  If Americans are to travel, they must have an infrastructure to support them.  It is almost as if there are two Americas—one stationary and one moving—and the two meet at exits when it is possible to get off the highway and move into town or city life.
 
Agee and Michael Berkowitz in their respective articles trace this growing phenomenon back to the 1930s with the working-class extension of the paid vacation and government promoted tourism.  For someone born in 1989, it is difficult to imagine leisure being organized in any other way.  We were brought up seeing this sort of artificial America, prepackaged for the road, for quick consumption, for ease.  It is somehow strangely comfortable for any of us who have grown up in suburban America
 
As air transportation increases, I wonder what will happen to the roads.  Will they die since we’ve started to hop around the globe without keeping track of our relation to the ground?  Instead of a convenience, they are now more of a hassle.  Suddenly, we can go to cities without passing this century old American roadside.  In a way, we are avoiding these prepackaged roadside sites, but with that, we give up our sound conception of spatial relations.  How will the near-immediate access to any city in the world affect our perceptions of time, space, and consumption?

Of anything we’ve read in class, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million is undoubtedly the funniest.  I continually found myself laughing aloud, and I really appreciated the change of pace from the certainly bleaker accounts we’ve been examining.  I felt a little bad laughing at a story of man who stumbled into so many misfortunes, but West’s novella exposes the ridiculousness of the pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps mentality through Lem’s determined optimism in a way that pity-invoking tales cannot do.  Instead of focusing on the negative effects of the capitalist system in Depression-era America, West mocks the entire system of ideologies.
 
In terms of travel and place, I found the role of New York City in Lem Pitkin’s “dismantling” particularly fascinating—maybe because we live here or perhaps due to the city’s continuing ability to stand as a beacon of the American dream.  When Lem first leaves his mother to make his “cool million” with only thirty dollars in his pocket, it is to New York he heads immediately.  New York epitomizes American opportunity and success (before the mid-twentieth-century suburban ideal).  It is a place, that based on its sheer size and infrastructure can purportedly give anyone an equal shot at making it big--gives everyone the “right to sell their labor and their children’s labor without restrictions as to either price or hours (110),” in the words of West.  For Lem though, who only first makes it to the city after a brief stint in jail, New York is not only an opportunity for success, but also for despair.  New York becomes a trap for the downtrodden to be knocked down even further—while pushing the wealthier up, of course.
 
New York is a land of specifically capitalist opportunity, a machine of sorts that will even turn on its strongest believers.  It is appropriate then that the surprisingly still optimistic Lem will return to New York after his journey across America, with a glass eye, wooden leg, and scalped head, only to be killed by a shot in the head.  Lem’s journey loops him back to New York, the ruthless lover who refuses to give anyone a break.
 
By the Sixties, this idealized image of New York—and the American city generally—will no longer exist, destroyed by the outflux of the middle class to the suburbs, and in 1975, Pres. Ford will essentially declare the then bankrupt city dead.  It seems that West’s mock-heroic tale of “the dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin” is especially resonant with us today, after interest in the city began to regenerate in a post-Robert Moses world.  Although the American capitalist dream  has persisted with and without New York, it is an urban optimism that West’s story embodies and which seems to make its content particularly poignant with (and perhaps terrifying to) city-dwellers.  How much of our own desire to be here is based on that same fated, senseless optimism?

Tom Kromer’s Waiting for Nothingis comprised of episodic accounts of the life of a vagrant in Depression-era America.  While Kromer’s novel does give us details about the day-to-day hardships of hobo life, it tells us something more.  Kromer’s depiction of life “on the bum” not only expresses the vagrants’ difficulty in finding food and “a flop” for the night, but also describes their lifestyle as the moral antithesis of bourgeois existence.  The same rules do not apply, and the bums have created their own social codes in reaction to their exclusion from those of acceptable society.
 
Vagabond existence in the Depression, according to Kromer, begins to reject the moral virtues of working we were discussing in class last week.  Kromer’s protagonist continually mentions that he used to look for work but eventually stopped; he gave up because he felt the inevitable continuation of his workless cycle.  He tries to get a job; there is no work; and they don’t want him anyway because he’s down-and-out.  Tom, the character, sees it as easier to give up and live on begging as opposed to willfully participating in a system that does not benefit him and the other unemployed men.
 
Tom has also given up on religion; prayer becomes a means of satiating the mission so that he can eat at night.  In his socio-economic position, he does not have the inclination to believe in the God of the bourgeois.  The concept does not seem to apply to his life.  “These stiffs are in this joint because they have no place to get in out of the cold, and this bastard asks them to stand up and tell what God has done for them.  I can tell him what God has done for them.  He hasn’t done a damn thing for them.  I don’t though.  It is warm in here.  It is cold outside (p. 39).”  Predestination and salvation are impossible to believe when your life is seen as living proof that you are not destined for success.
 
Perhaps at its core, the vagrant lifestyle, as portrayed by Kromer, undermines the individualism of American capitalist culture.  Things are shared (and hoarding for yourself only hurts the community), and no one stays in one place.  They cannot (and, secondly, refuse to) settle down, work hard, and remain content.  Their life is constant work and cannot be experienced in the same way as the bourgeois American dream.

Ben Reitman’s fictionalized autobiography Sister of the Road introduces a new archetypal character to our vocabulary of Depression-era literature that we may not have realized we were missing: the female transient.  This is not to say that we haven’t seen pivotal female characters in our readings thus far (Ma and Rose of Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath, Louis Adamic’s female hitchhiker, etc.), but we have not encountered a female figure depicted in a manner such as Reitman’s Bertha.  Ma and Rose of Sharon embody varying facets of domesticity within the larger Joad camp, and Adamic’s hitchhiker is presented to us as damaged goods of sorts, worn out and used up through the eyes of the (importantly) male narrator.  Sister of the Road aims to address similar issues, but through a focus on Box Car Bertha herself—not solely in relation to her child, lovers, or the wandering male artist.
 
I wonder how much of a stir rose around Reitman’s “autobiography”—not because of the books dubious basis in reality, but due to the substitution of a woman within a typically male role: the transient.  Already in the semester, we have seen a pattern in our protagonists that is perhaps epitomized by The Grapes of Wrath’s Tom Joad.  He is a criminal, a badass; he is not terribly concerned with settling down and seems to be more preoccupied with his own transient anti-establishment lifestyle.  Though he returns home and travels to California with his family, their closeness is less a priority than upholding his own pride.
 
Bertha does not perfectly fill the role of the wandering male transient, but perhaps posits a female alternative.  Bertha is not tied down by family and domestic obligations and is portrayed as an independent protagonist who can care for herself and face the harsh realities of the open road.  But unlike Tom Joad, there is an intense concern for her fellow transients (particularly female ones).  Whereas Tom comes off as self-involved and perhaps a bit chauvinistic, Bertha is depicted by Reitman as a woman wholeheartedly involved in curbing contemporary social problems.  While Tom is whining and moaning about the cops and the injustices toward the migrant workers, Bertha is actually doing something, working at transient camps to help other women “on the bum.”  The female duty to family is morphed into one to the entire female transient population.
 
I’m not sure if Bertha can stand as an entirely feminist figure in the context of our twenty-first-century understandings of the term, but she is certainly a break from the literary tropes we’ve seen in much of our Depression-era literature.  It’s nice to see a character not shown as either hopeless or shamelessly self-involved, and Bertha adds a dimension to the way we look at both women and men in the 1930s.

While looking at the selected photo books and reading their accompanying text, I found myself slipping back and forth between viewing them as journalistic inquiry and creative exposition.  This is not the same debate as to whether or not The Grapes of Wrathshould be read as a fictional work with significant real-life basis, but rather an inquiry of perspective and aesthetic value.  Is it possible to evaluate a piece of journalism (whatever “journalism” really means) in terms of its aesthetic, rather than social, value?  When does “journalism” simply become “non-fiction,” “memoir,” or “self-expression?”  Do they have to be mutually exclusive?  Does viewing journalistic documentation as art reduce the real-world potential of the objects?
 
These are particularly thoughts to keep in mind since the canonization of photography as a fine art in the late twentieth century.  The photographs of Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans have been integrated into any introductory art-history course that touches on photography, and it certainly cannot be denied that their images have a certain visual pull to them.  However, how can this be reconciled with the fact that these images were intended to convey truth and to show the lives of the common American?  The fact that photography represents life supposedly directly complicates its artistic value; it is no longer solely under control of the artist.  Debates over the “reality” of the photos of Lange have additionally put into question whether or not the work should be taken as true journalism.  But what about Ilya Ilf’s touristic photos taken from his handheld Leica—perhaps the 1930s equivalent of our own point-and-shoot cameras?  Are these “art” equally as much as our latest Facebook photo album?
 
Even the texts, read in conjunction with the photos, do not clarify much.  Paul Taylor and Erskine Caldwell use their text space to explicate the socio-economic situation of the downtrodden in the Western and Southern United States.  Perhaps these are the closest to “journalism,” including quotes from the people actually affected by the Depression.  James Agee’s stream-of-consciousness narrative, on the other hand, is more a reflection of the artist-as-observer.  It is enlightening in the sense that we learn about the relationship between the artist and the subject, but Agee’s text is entirely concerned with his own desires and emotions (a fact that comes under sharp criticism by Bourke-White and Caldwell).  Ilf and Petrov’s ‘American Road Trip’ pretty much ignores the fact that so many are suffering as it recounts their exploration of the country as journalists-cum-tourists.
 
So what we are left with are these artifacts.  They all tell us something about how some people viewed the country at a particular social and historical moment.  Whether these should be categorized as art or journalistic artifact perhaps doesn’t matter, in our currently expanding sense of the word “art.”  They all have form and try to convey particular observations that can be analyzed and appreciated as aesthetic and historical documents. These photos and text perhaps have to be seen less as “true” than real products of a particular culture at a particular time.  The popularization of photography has extended our realm of visual analysis to not be constricted to the fine arts, and it only makes sense that this broadening will also be applied in retrospect to romanticized ephemera of the past. 

As we delve further into the stories of writers traveling across Depression-era America, I can’t help but to keep thinking about what exactly has prompted them to document the multi-faceted nature of our country.  I think it would be an oversimplification to say that the majority of these documentary writers are solely motivated by political and journalistic impulses.  There must be something else that has pushed them to investigate the stories of the American middle and working classes.
 
In the excerpt from Pyle’s Home Country, he describes the seeming endlessness of the 1936 drought; its expansiveness of time and space gives a sense of disillusionment to the fact that the entire world is not actually in an extreme drought.  “It was only at night, when you were alone in the heat and unable to sleep, that the thing came back to you like a living dream, and you once more realized the stupendousness of it.  Then you could see something more than field after brown field, or a mere succession of dry water holes, or the matter-of-fact resignation on farm faces.  You could see then the whole obliteration of a great land… (49).”  It takes a removal of setting to remind the viewer that their conditions need not necessarily define their entire existences.
 
Pyle concludes that his and his wife’s “travel is a means of escape (468).”  It is a way for them to keep busy, to avoid settling into the horrible realities of the Depression.  To document journalistically is almost a way of moving closer to the down-and-out situations of working America, while simultaneously distancing themselves.  To record is to put a lens between the author and the subject, and maybe this objective space is occasionally intentional.
 
Nathan Asch’s visit to the brothel/bar exhibits a similar desire.  His writing moves the focus of documentation from a realm of work and family—where we have spent most time in our readings thus far—to one of pleasure.  Asch shows the need for a sphere of enjoyment, separate from the harsh realities of the quotidian.  “All I want to do is sit somewhere and not think about all the trouble I’ve seen (250-1),” explains Asch to a woman at the bar.
 
In a way, this escapism—travel, alcohol, prostitutes—serves to create a sort of alternative reality that balances out the dire situations that would envelop the writer, if it weren’t for travel.  I wonder what the writer feels he or she is getting out of his or her experiences on road, aside from a sharing of knowledge and information on overlooked populations and areas of our country.  How does the endless project of exploring our country serve to propel their escapist desires?

It is strange to finish a novel as episodic as ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ because you feel as if you are only leaving the stage but that the performance will continue on infinitely.  There is nothing left for the reader to do, and the same stream of hardships will continue to fall on Ma, Pa, Rose of Sharon, and Uncle John, the last remaining members of the Joad clan.  And the future doesn’t look too bright for Ruthie and Whitfield either, with the next generation symbolically confirmed into this cycle with Rose of Sharon’s stillborn child.
 
Perhaps it is due to his own extremely contemplative writing style, but Christopher Isherwood, in his review of ‘Grapes’ in 1939, criticizes the book as overly propagandistic, not leaving “the final verdict, the ultimate synthesis…to the reader.”  The reader is told by Steinbeck how to see these workers in a fairly matter-of-fact manner.  ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ is not about the inner turmoil and emotions of a particular character; it is, instead, a story of the hardships faced by a class at large. 
 
‘Grapes’ exists, as we have discussed in class, in a liminal state between fact and fiction: fiction based on fact, taken as fact.  This bizarre categorization obviously has ramifications for the reader: how do we look at ‘The Grapes of Wrath;’ should the plaints of Steinbeck’s farmer class be equivocated with the real-life economic troubles of the late 1930s?  Isherwood, while recognizing the talent of Steinbeck’s work, criticizes ‘Grapes’ for this exactly.  The Joad family becomes more than their characterizations; they are every migrant worker family in California.
 
I agree with Isherwood in thinking that perhaps the didactic nature of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ makes is less delectable to read, but I think about who would have read it circa 1939: certainly not the Joad families of the time.  It was perhaps necessary to cloud the line between description, propaganda, fact, and fiction to alert those with the leisure time for reading to begin to comprehend the situation.  If painted as entirely fiction, ‘The Grapes’ could have been brushed aside and ignored, but, I think, it is the questionable veracity of the hardships portrayed in the novel that make one question his or her own actions all the more.

It seems like every semester all of my classes eerily overlap in the strangest ways, or maybe it’s really just that I start to think about them in relation to each other.  I am currently taking a class on American Evangelicalism, and we’ve been reading and discussing Max Weber’s ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,’ and I can’t help but try to sort out the motives of the Joad family through Weber’s analysis.  In ‘The Protestant Ethic,’ Weber attempts to link the rise of Protestantism in the Western world with what he calls “the spirit of capitalism,” the moral and ethical desire to work hard not for need or greed, but because of its positive valuation.  Weber argues that, in a Protestant society—or one with secularized Protestant values—hard work (followed by financial gain) is a social marker of honesty, goodness, and moral superiority.  Weber sees the Protestant work ethic as a rejection of medieval traditionalism, working enough to sustain yourself, not for the sake of working.
 
The Joads—and the majority of the folks they meet in Oklahoma, California, or on the road—certainly subscribe to this ‘Protestant ethic.’  The tenant farmers in Oklahoma and the migrant workers in California are all treated with a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps approach.  Work is seen as a pillar of honesty and respect for the blue-collar Americans.  If you are not working diligently and constantly, you are not someone to be trusted.
 
However, the Joads’ situation is much more complicated than this after they fall victim to economic hardship.  What happens when work suddenly becomes a day-to-day means of survival for people already imbued with the ‘Protestant ethic?’  It almost seems to set a new scale of valuation where the capitalist bankers and land owners fall to the bottom of the moral hierarchy because their work is not of and with the earth.  They are not connected with the world around them through physical labor, and their white-collar jobs are not placed in the same realm of ‘work,’ despite the fact that they are inspired by the same ‘spirit of capitalism.’  Perhaps Steinbeck’s writing was seen as so radical and communistic because it seems to redefine capitalist morality so that those on top suddenly are moved to the bottom.  How do moral assessments change based on position, and how does Steinbeck investigate this instability in ‘The Grapes of Wrath?’

After our class discussion last Thursday and my first blog post, I couldn’t help but go into The Grapes of Wrath thinking about the romanticization of place, home, etc.  It’s been quite a while since I’ve read anything by Steinbeck—ninth grade??—and I couldn’t help but be taken aback by the living quality of the landscape in his descriptions.  The setting becomes its own character, and you can imagine the dust lifting and settling, as if the ground were breathing.  I haven’t quite figured out what this means for me, as the reader, yet though. 
 
I think I keep thinking obsessively about how each of the human characters relate to their homes though, on, or past, the cusp of migration.  Place serves not simply as a setting, but a palimpsest, a record of the past, of memory.  A plot of land becomes everything that ever happened on that plot of land, the physical reminder that yes, you did exist and work the land and harvest the crops and raise your family.  In Chapter 6, a childhood friend describes to Joad and the ex-preacher Casy the reasons he couldn’t leave after the banks ran the tenant farmers out of Oklahoma, likening his history with the land to a ghost that cannot and will not ever leave him:
 
“‘Like an ol’ graveyard ghos’.  I been goin’ aroun’ the places where stuff happened.  Like there’s a place over by our forty; in a gully they’s a bush.  Fust time I ever laid with a girl was there.  Me fourteen an’ stampin’ an’ jerkin’ an’ snortin’ like a buck deer, randy as a billy-goat.  So I went there an’ I laid down on the groun’, an’ I seen it all happen again.  An’ there’s the place down by the barn where Pa got gored to death by a bull.  An’ his blood is right in that groun’, right now.  Mus’ be.  Nobody never washed it out.  An’ I put my han’ on that groun’ where my own pa’s blood is part of it.’”
 
This memory association stretches to objects too, as when the generalized families of Chapter 9—representing both one particular and every general family migrating during the Depression—are selling and burning their belongings to lighten their travel loads.  It’s not just a horse, but “you’re buying a little girl plaiting the forelocks, taking off her hair ribbon to make bow, standing back, head cocked, rubbing the soft noses with her cheek.  You’re buying years of work, toil in the sun; you’re buying a sorrow that can’t talk.”
 
I don’t think that Steinback necessarily wants us the think that it is impossible to separate idea from object, but I do think he highlights the delight we can get in locating memory in something tangible.  It is why we have a room-full of unnecessary trinkets in our apartments and why we have a shoebox where we hoard old ticket stubs.  Places and things and sensations remind us of the past, and we love this memory-recall, whether consciously or subconsciously. 
 
It is inevitable to think about how three years ago, when I first moved to the city for school, how many things I brought from home: useless clutter, mostly, but it gave me comfort and something to relate to.  I’d like to think I don’t need personal belongings, but I am interested in how much they are a part of how we construct our homes.

What is it that propels us still around our own country, from coast to coast?  What is the point, and why do we still do it?  It is to collect a stack of postcards and picturesque photographs?  To experience the real America?
 
Erskine Caldwell, in his introduction to “Some American People,” proposed the latter.  He struck out on the road to avoid the pantheon of American monuments and sights to see; he wanted to find real people and have actual connections with them.  “During such a trip the contact with people is the one and all-important matter.”  Caldwell saw his cross-country adventure as a means of getting “close to humanity,” and, to him, awe-inspiring, expansive views of the American wilderness mean nothing if not placed in relation to their human counterparts.  Nearly thirty years later photographer Robert Frank will set himself on a similar task, and his 1958 book The Americans strives to document America from the bottom up.  Photos of the quotidian become an account of both the particular and the general; each person, interaction, connection part of an endless web.
 
In searching for a real America, I wonder equally about the creation of the touristic American Dream-land that Caldwell, Frank, etc. are trying to counter through their own experiences and documentation.  How does the idealized version of America sit in relation to the country in fact, and how do these two opposing—and continually evolving—images perpetuate the existence of each other?
 
Mental images of place are affected by memory, desire, fantasy—whether we’ve visited these places hardly matters.  Name and place can never be the same, and we situate ourselves in the disjoint between the two.  However, it is not as if we create these false visions unknowingly, and it is these American Dream-scapes that equally propel the mindless tourist and the documentarian.  Debunking our fantasies is an endless and unfruitful project, despite our relentless curiosity and thirst for knowledge; there will always be the romanticization of the mind, if only now in hindsight.  Finding the real America is a sort of dream itself.
 
Roland Wild oscillates between the desire of seeing and understanding America and the fear of actually carrying out his quest.  Is it a fear of spontaneity, tainting the pristine image of American life?  Can it ever truly be demolished?  It seems more of a slow modification.  Wouldn’t we rather hold on to at least some of these dream-images regardless?  And how do these visions of the world affect our own experience—and memories of experience—of the places in question when we finally do get there, seeing perhaps a decrepit ruin of a train station not the gleaming gold of Aunt Jenny’s postcard?