The ideal of better growth, the sense that a free society depends upon a spiritual vitality best cultivated in places cleared of history, nature, and people, promises a curious kind of liberation. Drawn to wide-open spaces, Americans seek freedom from the messy complexity of history, institutions, and the clutter and inconsistency of life. Variants of this can be found in the errand into the wilderness, or the frontier thesis that mourned the loss of seemingly limitless westward expansion, or in attempts to tell the American story as a series of revivals in which new spiritual energies revitalized decaying societies. In these portrayals, Americans are a people perpetually searching for a fresh start. These born-again narratives continue to persuade in spite of the diligent efforts of historians who insist these stories are nostalgic misrepresentation of events. More restrained historical analysts have told us, for example, that no errand existed among the first generation of American Puritans. This sense of mission and purpose was rather the projection of later descendents intent on aggrandizing the more modest ambitions of their forebears. If this is so, it means that America imagines its origins as a monumental project of spiritual freedom that exists as a standing rebuke to the quotidian reality of social life. Mather’s lament for lost “primitive principles” and “primitive practices” ties the American dream to an elusive origin existing in empty, imaginary utopian space perpetually undone by the real life failings of human beings.
The American answer to failure is to tell a story about success. Rather than mourning loss as loss, we are encouraged to pick ourselves up, start again, work hard, and succeed. We are reminded of the great things done for us by God and the obstacles faced and conquered by people whose suffering was far greater than ours. Above all, we are reminded of our freedom. For this reason, even the most modest attempts to ameliorate human suffering through collective projects to heal the sick, feed the hungry, or educate the young are seen by many today as signs of an encroaching tyranny. As it stands right now, freedom is the ubiquitous slogan of a selfish, petty, vicious, low-down politics that would be abhorrent to Peter and Peter’s God.
Freedom often finds itself in tough spots like this. It’s the kind of word that people want to do things it might not be able to do. Freedom’s remarkable elasticity seems to endow it with an uncommon ability to resist and to justify injustice, to call for something better and to say that things are fine the way they are. But one point of consistency is that freedom has a hard time reckoning honestly with the losses, failures, and violence that lie in its wake.
Like many of his generation, my father was inspired by On the Road. Ironically, he was drafted after he quit school in the spirit of Sal Paradise to wander America on a motorcycle. Kerouac also yearns for open space, but sees no need to clear it of people. He dreams of freedom instead by immersing himself in America to grow deeply within a mad tramping chaos of people, nature, and sin. On the Road ends with a kind of mourning, but one that lacks Mather’s monumental aspirations. Kerouac tells us instead of his friend Dean Moriarty, who has been the source of no small suffering in the lives of himself and others, wandering pathetically around the corner of Seventh Avenue toward an uncertain future. I remember discussing this chapter with my father. I do not recall the particulars of our conversation, but I know we both agreed its final sentence was really good. Here it is:
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
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