Trying to make some sense of where we are going...

"All this Americanizing and mechanizing has been for the purpose of overthrowing the past. And now look at America, tangled in her own barbed wire, and mastered by her own machines. Absolutely got down by her own barbed wire of shalt-nots, and shut up fast in her own "productive" machines like millions of squirrels running in millions of cages. It is just a farce."

DH Lawrence - Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

We will be tearing into the future in 2026, but lets see where we have been so far...

In the beginning, it was 1879 in Saint Petersburg. We were discussing the concerns of Fyodor Dostoyevsky in his novel A Brothers Karamazov, the liberalism and nihilism of Europe after the 1848 Revolutions, as well as the superstition and baseness of Russia. 

We stumbled backwards into Dickensian London, A Christmas Carol (1843) and witnessed the fear of poverty that drove Ebeneezer to amass a security of wealth and indifference to others. The fragmentation of industrialization. 

From there we traveled back in time to 1818 in the wake of the defeat of Napoleon's destructive decade and discussed Mary Shelly and her fears of scientism, hubris and isolation in her groundbreaking novel Frankenstein. 

Then, into the recent past we launched to 1980's Texas, Cormac McCarthy's novel, No Country for Old Men (2005). The indifferent and nihilistic villain Chigurh haunted the Texas desert, preaching his violent gospel of fatal determinism. Though, the American existential fog of Sheriff Bell seemed to be looming large, "How am I, or am I not my father or grand father?" he seemed to ask, "Where is this country going?"

Then, we stepped back and rolled into the West Coast of America. We spent 6 months in California with John Steinbeck, on his family ranch in the Salinas Valley in a novel he wrote for his two young sons. East of Eden (1952), we followed the journey of the American identity from the Civil War to the West through the broken Trask Family. It was Cain and Able, and can we be redeemed? What is our place in this whole human story? We were reinvited into the conversation that Sheriff  Bell was having, those existential American questions. 

And now, in December...

We are going back to when we started, to peek into the home of a middle class Norwegian Family, and discuss Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (1879). We'll see the world through a slightly different lens than we did through Dostoyevsky, and we'll ask similar questions to those of Sheriff Bell. 

The road ahead is just as exciting to me as where we have been. Sophocles' play Antigone (440 BC) in January will be a journey into justice, law, the state and religion. 

Then we will sit down with F Scott Fitzgerald and discuss The Great Gatsby (1925), the thin guild of optimism, progress, class and personal identity.   

Looking ahead, its A Brave New World (1931), and Slaughterhouse 5 (1969) that are looming large in my mind for this spring. Aldous Huxley's imagined dystopian future written right before the destructive ideologies fully formed in Europe pushing the world in to a destructive war, and Kurt Vonnegut's personal experience of that conflict, crushed under the weight of its meaning.

I started this post with the DH Lawrence quote because it very much reflects some of my thoughts in the conversation between A Brave New World and The Great Gatsby.  Lawrence and Huxley having an outside view of America, reflecting on the ethics of American Progress, and Fitzgerald with an insiders view. Can we see past "the farce"?