Excerpt from Chapter 1, "A Delicious Paradise Lost":
pg. 46
"They (pre-industrial revolution Americans) had little that was new; we have little that has persisted. This is true of things, relationships and values. That was a tranquil world. To be sure, they had their tragedies and sorrows, but they did not have the world's sorrow, from country after country, spilling nightly into their living rooms, their homes becoming places "where anguish comes by cable," to use W.H. Auden's words. They were permanent residents. We are nomads, perpetual immigrants, condemned to move from place to place in our own country until finally, if the sinews do not crack, we are allowed to pass into the forgetfulness of retirement. Their needs were simple and related to survival; our needs are complex because our horizons are multiple and our possessions must serve many functions besides those related to survival. They were attached to place, even if they had to move from the towns of their birth and settle elsewhere, and the had a sense of time; we have neither. Their world was permanent because they new God to be unchanging; ours is impermanent and God seems largely to have disappeared. Perhaps when our Wenham (Wenham, MA - the subject of this chapter, the "they" Wells refers to) townswoman became depressed she would have gone into the church to pray; her counterpart today would probably go to the mall to shop. Therein lies the difference between these two worlds, worlds that are so close in time but so far apart mentally.
pg. 50
This is the experience without community. It is the experience of mankind in the mass, bereft of the forces that once drew it into centers of human fraternity and organization. From the impersonal mass, small groups fly off and fashion their own small worlds: the beatniks, the teddy boys, the skinheads, the molls, the hipsters, the inner-city gangs, the metalheads, the drugged-out offspring of an affluent age. They are rebels, Christopher Lasch argues, whose cultural amnesia deprives them of the one thing they want most: the experience of being able to revolt. In these ad hoc cultural protuberances there is nothing to revolt against; there is only the contemporary moment dislocated from the past and the future and stripped of parents, community, values and beliefs. And yet these small worlds are so light, so weightless, that even the most fractured and fragile individual can feel safe and make connections, even if it is only with those who are equally fractured and fragile. In these psychological environments, a fraternity of the wounded, the frightened, the bored, and the disoriented typically develops, and with it comes an illusion of therapy."
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