House of Mirth

In Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth, Dreiser and Wharton created heroines that were the cosmopolitan equivalent of Emma Bovary. Self-hatred and aspiration—in short the desire to escape—were the driving forces behind characters like Lily Bart and Carrie Meeber. The seeds of the urban megalopolis had an effect on the romantic imagination that was equivalent to a drought feeding a brush fire. The industrial revolution, with its vast accumulations of wealth leading to both pleasure palaces and eventually to museums like the Morgan Library and the Frick, created a buffet of prospects that became the palette of self-invention. Decades later, in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, “Brazilian marching powder” would become the drug that fuels ascent, much the way the cocktail of power and money became the drug of choice for Tom Wolfe’s “masters of the universe” in Bonfire of the Vanities. Voyeurism is part of the life of the modern city. As in Rear Window, we all become material witnesses to both crimes and unattainable delights. We are all inadvertent spies as we awaken in the morning and go to sleep at night with views of huge high rises, their facades like little prosceniums in which we witness the despair and exultation of strangers. Ezra Pound famously said, “make it new,” and in a city like New York, the magnetism lies in the perverse notion that there is always something new under the sun that becomes more sought after the more ineluctable it is, and the more it holds the prospect of something that is in danger of being missed. That which doesn’t exist is always more appealing than those people and things whose parameters we know. Said more succinctly, familiarity breeds contempt—an emotion that Anna Karenina also knew something about.

The Road More Traveled

Truth be told, most people in our day and age take the road more traveled—even those millions who have read the M. Scott Peck bestseller named after the Robert Frost poem. It’s a pleasant enough poem. It implies that the less obvious ways of doing things and seeing the world, the unconventional ways, yield unexpected rewards. But it has nothing to do with the vicissitudes our modern Interstate highway system.

For instance, a traveler recently endeavored to go from Burlington, Vermont to Great Barrington, Massachusetts. The road less traveled was Route 7, which passed through many interesting towns the traveler might not have had a chance to see had he chosen a shorter route involving an Interstate highway. Unfortunately, the road less traveled added an extra hour and a half to the trip. Yes, it enabled the traveler to see Middlebury and Bennington, but it was totally dark by the time he arrived in Great Barrington. If he had taken the road more traveled, he would have missed Bennington and Middlebury, but seen Great Barrington.

   

Even though Shirley Jackson and her husband, the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, lived out their troubled lives in Bennington, Great Barrington is more of a crossroads, situated as it is in the Berkshires, in close proximity to both Tanglewood and Lenox, where Edith Wharton’s home, The Mount, is still preserved.  Middlebury sports a typical New England college campus, with wholesome stone buildings and a strong whiff of winter sport. It’s also the home of a famed A&W Root Beer stand, where waitresses still roller skate up to your car to take your order. But let’s face it, if you you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all.

   

What would Rogers E. M. Whitaker, the famed New Yorker writer, who wrote his famous train column under the pseudonym E.M. Frimbo, have said about the road less traveled?  No idea. Just a thought.

    

Times have changed. The fact is that the road more traveled is usually the shortest distance between two points, and often leads to greater spiritual insights. For instance, had the traveler reached Great Barrington on the earlier side, he might have had time to attend a seven o’clock meditation at the Congregational Church, or to browse the famous Book Barn, one of the greatest used bookstores in New England, located on an otherwise deserted back road deep in the woods near the town.

    

On the other hand, if the traveler is tuned in to NPR, it hardly matters whether he takes the road less traveled or the road more traveled. It might make sense to take the road less traveled if it’s Saturday night at six and Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion is on the radio. On the other hand, if it’s a Sunday afternoon, an ambitious driver on the road more traveled might squeeze in Ira Glass’s This American Life, followed by All Things Considered, and still arrive in time to unpack before dinner. In the twenty-first century, the decision to take the road less traveled isn’t about nonconformity. It’s about scheduling. There is a reason why the road more traveled is more traveled. Like modern love for David Bowie, it gets you to the church on time.