Oregon Humanities

The Stuff of Life

Kathleen Holt

In Lorrie Moore’s short story “Agnes of Iowa,” from her excellent collection Birds of America, the main character, while a foreign exchange student in Copenhagen, is confronted by a Danish man who asks her, “The United States—how can you live in that country?” Moore writes: “‘A lot of my stuff is there,’ she’d said, and it was then that she first felt all the dark love and shame that came from the pure accident of home, the deep and arbitrary place that happened to be yours.”

When I first read this story shortly after it was published ten years ago, this line appealed to me because of the humor of the imagined moment: a young girl who is left to inexpertly defend her country comes up with the best explanation she can. On one level, yes, home is merely where our stuff is. But on later readings, the second part of the line profoundly resonated with me: “the dark love and shame” of being where you are from. And this year, as I edited this issue of Oregon Humanities, the combination of the two concepts raised an alarming question, one that I’d been considering for years, though most often obliquely: is being American, at its very core, about owning a lot of stuff?

As many of the essays in this issue suggest, there does seem to be an irresistible—and sometimes terrible—link between our identities as Americans and consumers: Louise Bishop references last year’s awful episode in which a Wal-Mart employee was trampled to death by shoppers on Black Friday (page 29). John Frohnmayer describes attending his first and only shareholders meeting and declares that “capitalism, if it continues in its present form, will destroy us” (page 26). John Campbell posits that America’s obsession with consumer goods can be traced back to the Reagan era, but concedes that there is also something physical and elemental about consumption (page 17).

Indeed, it’s difficult to categorically decide that the acquisition of material goods is something that is solely cultural and always negative. Other writers in this issue look at these subtle intricacies of consumerism, collecting, and hoarding. In particular, John Holloran explores materialism as a problem of disenchantment with things that have the potential to be imbued with meaning and soul if only we remembered their origins and stories (page 12).

The effort to find the Moore book so that I could quote from it here was telling: I spent a Sunday afternoon digging through box after box full of nonessential items that we’d packed away as we remodeled our house. After a few hours, I finally found a box unhelpfully marked “books and stuff” at the bottom of a stack in the guest-room closet. In the box was not only this book, but also a handful of other favorite books, a set of wireless headphones, one of my daughter’s coloring books, a Spanish-English verb conjugation book, and a stack of unsent holiday letters from 2006.

For a moment, I felt like an archaeologist, elated but puzzled by the found items laid out before me. This box had clearly been packed in haste, a last-minute sweep of a room that brought all of these disparate items together to be buried in the same resting place. Until now, I’d not noticed the absence of these things in my daily life and, in fact, was surprised to realize they’d been missing at all. But they were, each of them, important enough to me that, in the frenzy of packing, I’d put them in a box rather than in the trash or giveaway pile. In some cases, it was the creation of the item that meant something. In other cases, it was the symbolism or potential usefulness of the item that spared it. It was good to have that moment to remember and reflect—before I packed them up and put them away again.