Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

“Dear.” Hostesses are becoming impatient at writing “ … request the pleasure of …”They telephone or telegraph.The audience is not in evening dress, but Archie MacLeish and I are. Thatis a convention. We explain it as being a “courtesy to the audience,” but this audiencewhich has just kindly hustled over from its dormitories sees through this. Theysuspect that it is an attempt to dress me in a little essential authority. What do I donext week when I must talk on Thoreau, who said, “Beware of all enterprises thatrequire new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes”?The chief thing to remember about conventions is that they are soothing.They whisper that life has its repetitions, its recurring demonstrations that all iswell—happy thought, that life with all its menace, its irruptions of antagonism andhatred, can be partially tamed, civilized by the pretense that everyone to whom oneaddresses a letter is dear and that every dinner guest is a pleasure. Densely populatedcountries—in Europe, but above all in Asia—develop a veritable network of theseforms; but Americans feel little need of them. They even distrust them; they thinkthat civilization can advance better without fictions.Time was when one had to flatter the tyrant by telling him how kind hewas; one reminded him that he was Serenissimus and Merced and Euer Gnaden,and that as a Majesty he was certainly gracious—as one says to a snarling dog:“Good, good Fido.”Americans do not ask that life present a soothing face. Even if they are ina contented situation they do not hope that life will continue to furnish them Moreof the Same. They are neither fretful nor giddy, but they are always ready for SomethingDifferent. In Europe everyone is attentive and pleased during ceremonial andsecular ritual and these conventions of courtesy; in America people shuffle theirfeet, clear their throats, and size up the audience.Archie is introducing me just right. He is telling them that I am a veryhard-working fellow and that I travel about a good deal exhibiting curiosity.The audience applauds.Myself: Mr. MacLeish, ladies and gentlemen: In 1874, CharlesEliot Norton wrote his friend John Ruskin. …Another convention.The French do this kind of thing superlatively well. They manage in anopening paragraph to allude to the auspices which furnished the occasion, to thankthe authorities which invited them, to hint at their own unworthiness, to announcetheir subject, and to introduce a graceful joke.But I am an American before Americans, and immediately something goeswrong. The fact that I am happy to have received their invitation now comes into186