Castles in Air

The American democracy and dream are the building of castles in air. Whither goeth the one so goeth the other, these days up in smoke and the spout.

Roman-style interior swimming pool at Hearst Castle in San Simeon, CA.

By Lewis H. Lapham

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
— Norman Douglas

There may not be an “American character,” but there is the emotion of being American…that feeling…of nostalgia for some undetermined future when man will have improved himself beyond recognition and when all will be well.
— V.S. Pritchett

Home in the American scheme of things is a word furnished with as many meanings and locations as money and mother, God and the flag. A place always somewhere in mind if not on a map or lost to a bank, there to be found over a rainbow or bridge, around the next bend in a river or road. Down on the farm or back in the sticks, crossing the bar or the plate. In the burbs with the wife and the kids, out on the range with the deer and the antelope, on a centerfold page in Architectural Digest, at $10,000 a square foot where never is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day.

This issue of Lapham’s Quarterly takes up the topic of home and its whereabouts because also in the American scheme of things the chance at a home of one’s…