Very thoughtful and insightful. This essay remains timely despite its over thirty-five years. Thank you to my friend John for recommending it. Stegner's quotes, historical references and views evoked, fear, self appraisal, doubt, shame, embarrassment, and analysis in my own mind. It has a pessimistic bent but that helps make his point and he ends with more hope than downer. I was prickled when he demonized pleasure, feeling his perspective was skewed against it without seeing how a less puritanical perspective could offer hope for more divinely inspired human interaction and therefore a greater progress and purpose for this grand experiment of the human existence/American Experience. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants a thought provoking discourse on culture, politics, property and America.
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