My God, you sound like some dreary French intellectual who’s just set foot in New York for the first time! That’s exactly the way they talk! Unreal! American motels are unreal! My good girl—you know and I know that our motels are deliberately designed to be unreal, if you must use that idiotic jargon, for the very simple reason that an American motel room isn’t a room in a hotel, it’s the room, definitively, period. There is only one: The Room. And it’s a symbol—an advertisement in three dimensions, if you like—for our way of life. And what’s our way of life? A building code which demands certain measurements, certain utilities and the use of certain apt materials; no more and no less. Everything else you’ve got to supply for yourself. But just try telling that to the Europeans! It scares them to death. The truth is, our way of life is far too austere for them. We’ve reduced the things of the material plane to mere symbolic conveniences. And why? Because that’s the essential first step. Until the material plane has been defined and relegated to its proper place, the mind can’t ever be truly free. One would think that was obvious. The stupidest American seems to understand it intuitively. But the Europeans call us inhuman—or they prefer to say immature, which sounds ruder—because we’ve flounced their world of individual differences and romantic inefficiency and objects-for-the-sake-of-objects. All that dead old cult of cathedrals and first editions and Paris models and vintage wines. Naturally, they never give up, they keep trying to subvert us, every moment, with their loathsome cult-propaganda. If they ever succeed, we'll be done for. That's the kind of subversion the Un-American Activities Committee ought to be investigating. The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live inside our advertisements, hermits going into caves to contemplate. We sleep symbolic bedrooms, eat symbolic meals, are symbolically entertained and that terrifies them, that fills them with fury and loathing because they can never understand it. They keep yelling out, “These people are zombies!” They've got to make themselves believe that, because the alternative is to break down and admit that Americans are able to live like this because, actually, they're a far, far more advanced culture five hundred, maybe a thousand years ahead of Europe, or anyone else on earth, for that matter. Essentially we're creatures of spirit. Our life is all in the mind. That’s why we're completely at home with symbols like the American motel room. Whereas the European has horror of symbols because he's such a groveling little materialist…
A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood. Finally read this, what took me so long. But it was the perfect moment, it felt so relevant. It’s the kind of book that makes me wish I were in a literature class, it begs for group dissection and discussion. What does it mean that the title character ranting here is a British ex-pat? And what about elsewhere in the book (day) where he mourns the emptiness of American consumerism? Who is the character and who is the author? The recipient of this rant never gets to respond.
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