I’ve lived in the United States of America for sixty-five years. I’ve been teaching American literature for the last twenty-seven of those.
My American lit surveys–particularly the sophomore-level general education version–begin with indigenous creation stories and trickster tales before moving to the letters of Cristoforo Colombo, i.e., Christopher Columbus. From there, it’s on to the writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas and the American Puritans (including those we typically style as “Pilgrims”). My students and I then read from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, usually winding up the semester with poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
Having gone through some portion of these writings–in both undergraduate and graduate courses–every semester, I have come to believe that the one consistent American experience is that of decay, in all its not-so-varied noun and verb meanings:
- to decline in health, strength, or vigor
- to fall into ruin
- to decline from a sound or prosperous condition
- rot
- gradual decline in strength, soundness, or prosperity or in degree of excellence or perfection
- destruction, death; Merriam-Webster identifies this meaning as “obsolete,” but I think we have a good shot at bringing it back
The United States of America has decayed to the extent that it’s no longer even half of what it thinks itself to be. And if the USA is supposed to be–as it thinks it is–God’s gift to the world, it is now a cheap knock-off of the nation initially imagined, of the nation it might have been if it’d been able to live up to its own ideals and fend off the inevitable decay.
As Emily Dickinson wrote,
I reason, we could die–
–SECOND STANZA OF HER POEM 403
The best Vitality
Cannot excel Decay,
But, what of that?