"It Takes All The Running You Can Do, To Keep In The Same Place."

I mean no harm to Agee but I just have trouble understanding how this latest piece could at all fit into a selected works of journalism. It’s written well enough—very well—with ideas that sometimes seem spot on. But it seems like all mirth, no matter. That’s what struck me—the excitement he had. It struck me and at times annoyed me like listening to a friend tell you how great the second cut off the White Album is. But Agee writes of American travel with the enthusiasm usually reserved today for more global adventures. “I spent the whole summer in a town in Alabama,” Agee might tell you. And you say, “Well I backpacked through Southeast Asia. Saw eighteen-hundred Buddhist temples in fifteen weeks. Then I hiked New Zealand.” Restive is right! And it’s taken us somewhere.

But we aren’t all restive. Agee clearly is. College students are expected now to be. It’s innumerable the number of times I’ve been asked if I’ve traveled abroad and if I will. The observational class is trained to be restive. If you’ve got the time or money you’re considered a fool by your fellow travelers not to see as much as you possibly can of this loud and crowded globe.

The Amazing Race

The class that mulls and mildews on life alone—not on exotic spectacle because seeing and all the senses themselves are luxuries when breathing is the only effort—breathing and thinking clearly—that is the other class who isn’t restive because they can’t be. Because that would be silly. Because sometimes one must learn to keep himself going rather than be kept going because there’s another vista up ahead or because of that fascinating city where people wear blue hats and the number one record is twelve tracks of boiling water.

After writing his opus on three struggling tenant families whom (I thought) he found to epitomize America, I’m surprised he can turn around and say America is restive. It seems to me if anything can be said at all about America it’s that it’s big. People are poor here and rich there. Like rap here and country there. There’s a depression and here’s prosperity. Some guys live for restlessness while others live for rest. Agee might have done well to quit defining America after he did it once. If it’s true that we’re restive I think we shouldn’t be. I think we ought not to run from contemplation. I think this restiveness is an appetite and distracts us from our larger human aims that might have better been accomplished before we started running around to see as much as we can, to see everything. Those goals before the automobile and the highway were breathing and satisfaction. And in fact, they still are. Running around makes us breath faster, not more. And it hastens our insatiability—makes it more impossible than it ever could have been. I think Agee was wrong to say that’s who we are. It’s simply how those who travel wish to make us. Because they’ve seen more than you. Because they’ve been to San Remo and the jazz is phenomenal. Unlike anything you’ve ever heard.