America! America!

America! America!

When I came back to New York last fall, just in time for the Sputnik, after a year in London and two months in Tuscany, I felt I had crossed a boundary much wider than the Atlantic. We are an unhappy people (I felt), a people without style, without a sense of what is humanly satisfying. Our values are not anchored securely, not in the past (tradition) and not in the present (community). There is a terrible shapelessness about American life. These prosperous Americans look more tense and joyless than the people in the poorest quarters of Florence. Even the English seem to have more joie de vivre.

No nation in history has been richer or has had a more equal distribution of wealth, and since 1940 there has been a fantastic increase ...


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