Site was one of millions in a culture that had been bamboozled for reasons no one quite understands into accepting a cheap destructive idea of success. poorest county of Minnesota, and when the Depression reduced penury to catastrophe, moved into a pdor, small house in Minneota. While their storage space shrank, their goods expanded, and the double beds became single beds after the floor space filled up to the bedsprings. They were a family on whom nothing was lost, not even the useless doo-dads that arrived from answering every “free special offer” ad for over a half century. They accumulated no cans full of bank notes, no hidden treasure, nothing of any genuine monetary value; the Bardals were, in that regard, truly poor. But not poor in mind or spirit! They owned books in three or four languages: Plato, Homer, Bjornsson in Norwegian, Snorri Sturlasson in Icelandic, Whitman, Darwin, Dickens, Ingersoll, Elbert Hubbard, piles of scores by Handel, Bach, Mozart, George Beverly Shea and Bjorgvin Gudmundsson, old cylinders of Caruso, Galla-Curci, Schumann-Heink, John McCormack, cheap books reproducing paintings and sculpture from great European museums, organ, piano, violin, trumpet, manuals for gardening, cooking and home remedies, the best magazines of political commentary and art criticism next to Capper’s Farmer, the Minneota Mascot, and the Plain Truth, dictionaries and grammars in three or four languages, books of scientific marvels, Richard Burton’s travel adventures, old text books for speech and mathematics, Bibles and hymn books in every Scandinavian language, Faust, The Reader’s Digest, and “Sweet Hour of Prayer." That tiny house was a space ship stocked to leave the planet after collecting the best we have done for each other for the last 4,000 years of human consciousness. And none of it worth ten cents in the real world of free enterprise! The executors might as well have torched the house, thus saving the labor of sorting it, giving mementos to friends and peddling the rest at a garage sale on a sweltering summer afternoon. What one realized with genuine astonishment was that the Bardals piled this extraordinary junk not only inside their cramped house; that house was a metaphor for their interior life which they stocked with the greatest beauty and intelligence they understood. They read the books, played the instruments, carried the contents of that house in their heads. T/ie author's indignation. I try, again and again, through literature, music, history and experience, to get at the point of failure— but I fail. Perhaps that /s my point. Clear logical structures, much as I love them myself, are not so germane as the “touch of regret that comes from the heart” in understanding what I am trying to penetrate. This idea began with an image, a comparison, really. Disgusted with my whole country after the 1984 election, with its bludgeoning rhetoric of business success, military victory, and contempt for the failures and oddballs of America who have tried to ask difficult questions, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be in a room with my own leaders, perhaps inviting the current administration over to my house for drinks. Aside from their withering scorn that someone so obviously able and white would choose to live in a shabby house in an obscure backwater like Minneota (this would provoke only angry sputtering fulmination from me), I realized that they would bore the bejesus out of not only me, but everyone I valued and a great many of those I didn’t. I would rather have spent an evening with Pauline Bardal, playing music and listening to her Icelandic stories. This poor, presumably ignorant and obscure woman would even have taken the fun out of the drinks, since she disapproved of them, yet she was more fit to organize society than the most exalted leaders on the planet. She was not empty as a human, and therefore, however ordinary, gave off love, and could not be boring in quite the same way. Since she had a genuine feeling for beauty, though little skill at making it, “good will” and some richness of soul would enter a room with her and grace it. And yet she was one of mil .ons in a culture that had been bamboozled for reasons no one quite understands into accepting a cheap destructive idea of success and publicly worshiping it in the most demeaning and mindless way. That success idea surfaced like a hydra after every American disaster that ought to have taught us something about ourselves, history and love—the Viet Nam War, the Depression, the imperialist fiascos with Spain and the Philippines at the turn of the century, the Civil War. The poor and the drunk: two more kinds of failure. Two failures we teach children to fear are poverty and alcoholism. We state them positively: work hard and stay sober. Yet Christianity, to which we give public lip service, praises glad poverty; many alcoholics date the birth of their true humanity from the realization of booze’s awful power in their lives. James Agee, in the course of spending a summer writing about Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1988 7
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