DREAM BOOKS

...We want the white frame house, but not the hopeless aunt who lived upstairs...

...This is true of a number of the catalog's readers, no doubt, and it is full of really good buys, but I think that what my brother-in-law said remains true for a lot of readers of the Bean catalog: they read it yearning after the sparse exciting life it is built around, imagining that with sufficient time and leisure this is what they would be doing (they certainly know they would like to try it...

...It was responsible for several other publications, spin-offs from the sensibility Whole Earth tried to map...

...The impression this shallow nostalgia creates is that we can buy back our souls with deliberate profound bows to the icons captured by Whole Earth Catalog and Foxfire, even Sominex commercials-we will be saved if we do not scorn the small farmer, the miner, the white frame house built with care rather than with factory prefab slabs of composition material...

...They involve the recognition of those complications which made the culture we have grown away from-the one in which children, old people, idiots, the unborn and the dead were part of one community-a community which was at times unpleasant and difficult to live in...

...The direct control of your life was, if not exactly in your own hands, close enough to hit in the nose, or fawn at its feet...

...The Whole Earth Catalog and Whole Earth Epilog advise 'about all sorts of tools, resources, good books, things you can do to be a great organic gardener, give a good massage, learn your latent meditative capacities, start organizing to create a new order along ecologically sane lines...

...but the great majority of the people who read these books do not...

...It gives aesthetic satisfaction to its readers...

...We might have grown up under the El, or in a suburb where nothing was ever allowed to live more than ten years without being bulldozed...

...Old people have even begun to call themselves "senior citizens," giving in to our worst national product, a language which has been processed to allow us to say anything without blushing...

...It's interesting that TV commercials frequently portray small towns...

...it is always the small town South or Midwest or New England-all of those places where despite the paradise air people still have to take Sominex...

...What we have accepted, for reasons of security, is a language and a definition of life which comes to us from the hands of a few people whose purpose is to rule us or sell us things...

...I don't mean to say simply that the old days were good and ours are bad...

...So the catalog, excellent a resource as it is, is also an end in itself...

...After awhile he said, "I guess this was for my generation what the Whole Earth Catalog" is now: a dream book...

...Even small town society has been liberated into white leather shoes and leisure suits and what people are taught to regard as worldly appreciations: the routine nastiness of a show like Maude, for example, is considered sophisticated, and the successful community living of people like the Hutterites and the Amish is considered antique, despite the fact that Hutterite dropouts usually end up coming home, and ours do not...

...The idea of being known, by a place is alien to us...

...Psalm 103 says, "As for man, his days are like grass...

...we want to go where the only worm in the apple is the occasional need for Sominex...

...It doesn't matter that you can't buy anything in it- you really aren't reading it with that in mind...

...Some of...

...One was the magazine Mother Earth News, and there were the books Domebook and Domebook 2 (Shelter Publications, $5), The Foxfire Book (Anchor, $3.95), and Foxfire 2 (Anchor, $4.50) . . . these are only a few of the hundreds which came in hard and paper covers from large and small presses after Whole Earth's success...

...The Whole Earth Catalog went through several editions and has an apparently final successor (Whole Earth Epilog, Penguin, $4...

...Any alternative is a breath of fresh air...

...Among those tasks are self-discipline and a sense of obligation to others in the community which could in turn lead to the sacrifice of our greatest idol, self-fulfillment...

...The Foxfire books are the outcome of a decent project undertaken to preserve and vivify Appalachian culture, and contain just about everything rural and practical, from advice of value to subsistence fanners, to ghost stories picked up from people who still believe them...

...They try to conjure "up the emotion of going home to Mom and Dad, to late evening swings on front porches, the kind that wrap all the way around gracious frame houses anyone would love to go to bed in, settling under the comforter to the sound of cicadas under sycamore shadows cast against light brown shades...

...He was right...

...For many of them it might as well be one of those early twentieth century Sears catalogs which have been reprinted, with all their funny shoes and intricate little machines...

...But you don't hear work songs now, or meet many people whose satisfaction is with their work more than with the money which is its byproduct...

...If you haven't seen the L. L. Bean catalog you should...

...We aren't willing to do it, we know it wouldn't be comfortable, we suspect that their experiment will be temporary, but we take hope from the fact that it can be sustained even for a short time...

...There are those who actually do go out and build those domes, pitch those tents, make all their own clothes out of organic materials, and live from the land more than from money...

...It really is interesting...

...It is good to hear of communes formed by people who depend on wind and available water and good Weather for their living...

...The Dome-books limit themselves to the single topic of structures for living in, with valuable instructions and resources...

...it was formerly called "the world," as in world, flesh, and devil) are using some important fragments of a former culture, a few pictures which float at the surface of an attitude toward life which we remember and which was once general...

...and although it is now for most of us nostalgia, it is powerful enough to send us after the hope those pictures evoke...

...he flourishes like a flower of the field...

...What they all have in common is a great deal of practical advice for people who are likely never to use it, but who like to feel that the men and women who produced these books are their kind of people...

...We buy an old house, put on bib overalls, sit on the front porch, drink lemonade, and wonder why we do not feel that we have come home...

...They (grant me here the paranoia of believing in a "they...

...And at the same time we turn from facing the fact that community obligations' which result in moments of true joy and celebration can't be sought with those ecstatic ends in mind, but come instead as a result of the self-loss which work in a real community always involves...

...It's rather the enchantment of the fact that things weren't always the way they are, and the possibility that they don't have to be that way...

...Maybe it is' the beginning of cultural salvation to recognize wastefulness, the passing of craft and personal responsibility, but there are other tasks which are necessary if what we want is a genuine recovery of culture and not another passing fad Those tasks aren't as easy as acknowledging our feelings...

...I don't mean this as a putdown of the people who have compiled some very good reference works which unlike most advertised things do everything they claim to do, but I think an appeal similar to the one exercised by Whole Earth Epilog, Foxfire, and the rest can be found in recent Sominex commercials...

...What we have given up is a less secure, often difficult and oppressive, way of life in which communities at least knew an independence of language and cultural life, and an interdependence in which teachers, farmers,, preachers, and bankers-even when they hated each other-had to arrive responsibly at what really were living arrangements...

...We must love the vague thing called "naturalness...

...the quiet village square, without the village idiot...

...the houses described there are gorgeous and even look comfortable, if you go in for elfin decor, others might keep the rain off, but, in any case they are not conventional: the housing described is an alternative...

...What is the dream that makes these books successful...

...still we want to be where we've never been, where the mother who wears an apron and the father whose general store bell dings whenever someone comes in for a cinnamon stick, where those parents we never had but know we deserve, will welcome us...

...and this picture of an alternative to the life they are living is refreshing...

...Our own more comfortable and more anxious world suffocates us...

...The Bean catalogs, the Sears reprints, as well as the Whole Earth Catalog, are all dream books, enchanters...

...It is full of tempting advertisements for rugged and attractive clothes, outdoor gear, great looking boots and plain flannel pajamas, the assumption being that the people reading the catalog tend to be hunters and fishermen,' well acquainted with the outdoors, at home with rough comforts in the woods...

...What does this yearning for being what we are not, but would like to be, say about what we are...

...for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more...

...We feel guilty for letting some good things die for the sake of what we have been taught to revere: cheap style, money, pieces of the action...