Be Still, and Feel America’s Oneness

“At the still point of the turning world, there the dance is.”

It came to me like a bell, unsolicited, from a quiet stretch of Ohio farmland. A single line of verse written by an American poet who, until that moment of clarity on an unseasonably warm and clear December day, probably had never meant much to most of middle America.

T.S. Eliot wasn’t exactly a nature poet, after all, or, for that matter, a beatnik of the on-the-road variety. You don’t expect to quote him driving cross-country in the U.S. of A.

But then, you remember why there must be a shard of Eliot’s prim, Anglicized soul still residing in the Midwest: He was born there. Some inborn part of him knew the quality of absolute stillness of a dilapidated barn in the middle of a field, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of a war. The still point of the turning world.

It is a little spot of dirt and fertilizer and Norman Rockwell and faceless turnpike that does not mean much to anyone but the people who grew up there and never left.

Growing up in Michigan, I knew that stillness, that flat expanse of weary nothingness, that unremarkable plain of industry and absence stretching drearily out and on. It seemed a suffocating sameness that made one long for a crowd and a loud conversation.

Anything but this. Anywhere but here.

Back then, I, like any teen of even modest ambitions, couldn’t wait to escape. But now, coming home for the holidays, I look out with different eyes at that same landscape, smack dab in the zone of the cultural plebe--the “red” America, the states that election night television colored in for Bush.

I see for the first time, in all the relentless mess of the past three months, that this is what we’re really fighting for. This corny storybook place, this nondescript roadside limbo is, in fact, all-important. Another poet, W. H. Auden, the Englishman adopted by Americans, put it this way, “Each tiny hair casts a shadow through the universe.”

Palookaville matters. It does not belong solely to the churchgoing, gun-toting militiaman, sor the surrendered wife and her cookie-cutter kids, or Friday night bingo and the Moral Majority, or any other caricature that campaign managers and facile social historians have dreamed up.

We segregate the intellectual elite, and the self-help enlightened bourgeoisie, and they segregate themselves attitudinally because they vote for Democrats in the coastal “blue” Al Gore states.

But we forget how many of them hail from Winesburg or Main Street or some equally uninspired cliche. They did not spring, full-grown, from the head of the urban leviathan.

Ezra Pound, the towering expatriate, was from Idaho. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison grew up in Loraine, another piece of relentless Ohio farmland.

A tentative normalcy has crept back in these last few weeks, and we’ve hardly noticed. The seasonal blockbusters are cashing in hand over fist at the nation’s movie theaters. “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings” are as beloved by Mr. New York Review of Books as they are by Mr. Nobody Special, because much as they’d have you believe otherwise, they’re the same person.

We are not really, as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb asserts, one nation with two impossibly alienated cultures--especially now. We’re all humbled and a little shaky, which makes for a slightly more genuine, if fragile, holiday spirit.

Consumer confidence may be down, but this year, as in every other year here in Whoville, the Grinch couldn’t stop Christmas from coming, and neither can Osama bin Laden.