morning at Grabov Rat  (Aug.30, 2005)

As an immigrant, I was ready for my societal ranking to be scaled down as compared to my homeland public and professional appearance. Even in my homeland, I had an uneasy feeling that some of my higher achievements were the outcome of a weak competition in a small country with limited human resources. What I was not prepared for is how much I miss casual conversations with the people of some societal distinction. But then, in US it might not be a problem of an immigrant only.

Given the sheer size of the country and the heterogeneity of ethnic and religious groups, American intellectuals, as Kristol has put it, "meet one another in the dark, so to speak". The men who edit the large magazines usually lack the opportunity to meet anyone of distinction in politics, drama, or music. The political people are in Washington, the publishing and theater people in New York, the movie people in Los Angeles, and the professoriat is scattered across the country in the large universities. The universities have become the dominant force in the American cultural world today: many novelists, composers, painters, and critics find their havens in the far-flung universities, and many of the major literary and cultural quarterlies are edited there.

Daniel Bell: The disjunctions of cultural discourse, in The cultural contradictions of capitalism, Twentieth anniversary edition, BasicBooks, New York, 1996.