Nonconformity by Nelson Algren Read Free Book Online

there with guilt. Faces full of such an immense irresponsibility toward themselves that they tell how high the human cost of our marvelous technological achievements has really been.
    Faces to destroy the faith that a man’s chief duty in the world is to make himself as comfortable as possible in it, stay comfortable as long as possible and pop off at last, as comfortably as possible.
    The faith that the good life means coming into theworld with a Ford in one’s future and leaving it at last with a Nash in one’s past. That success is a TV aerial on the roof, a faithful wife in the kitchen and a deep freeze in the cellar wherein she may keep his useless memory ever-fresh.
    (Let me hurriedly interpose that I am not opposed to TV, Fords, Nashes, refrigerators, nor fidelity. I favor all mechanical improvements about the modern American home. I wish only to voice a suspicion that a house full of functional goodies, and all in good working order at that, does not of itself tote up to happiness.)
    Do American faces so often look so lost because they are most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?
    If so, this is the truly American disease. And would account in part for the fact that we lead the world today in insanity, criminality, alcoholism, narcoticism, psychoanalysm, cancer, homicide and perversion in sex as well as in perversion just for the pure hell of the thing.
    Never on the earth of man has he lived so tidily as here amidst such psychological disorder. Never has any people lived so hygienically while daily dousing itself with the ritual slops of guilt. Nowhere has any people set itself a moral code so rigid while applying it quite so flexibly. Never has any people possessed such a superfluity of physical luxuries companioned by such a dearth of emotional necessities.In no other country is such great wealth, acquired so purposefully, put to such small purpose. Never has any people driven itself so resolutely toward such diverse goals, to derive so little satisfaction from attainment of any. Never has any people been so outwardly confident that God is on its side while being so inwardly terrified lest he be not.
    Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic.
    “I say,” Walt Whitman prophesied, “we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States.… It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.” 61
    Our assumption of happiness through mechanical ingenuity is nonetheless tragic for being naive. For the bulletins are as false as Mr. Whittaker Chambers, hand over heart, confessing, “I never inform on anyone but I feel something die inside me”—and in the same dying breath murmuring, “Thank you,” for $75,000 in magazine serial rights. To see life steadily, and see it whole, as a creature of the deep sees it, from below.
    Our myths are so many, our vision so dim, our self-deception so deep and our smugness so gross that scarcely any way now remains of reporting the American Century except from behind the billboards.
    “Whin business gits above sellin’ ten-pinny nails in a brown-paper cornucopy,” Mr. Dooley decided, “ ’tis hard to tell it from murther.” 62
    But behind Business’s billboards and Business’s headlines and Business’s pulpits and Business’s press and Business’s arsenals, behind the car ads and the subtitles and the commercials, the people of Dickens and Dostoevsky yet endure.
    The lost and the overburdened who have to meet life so head-on that they cannot afford either the tweeds that make such a strong impression in certain business circles or