I wish you could speak, my absent friend. I would enjoy listening to your perspective on the aim of contemporary American life. It seems to me that it is certainly indolence. What seems a better life for the standard American than to possess enough wealth, and so sufficient resource, to sleep late. One wants to pay servants to perform menial tasks. One wishes to travel idly, flittering about here and there without setting root or finding understanding in the local soil. The task is no task at all. Celebrations arise spontaneously with vacuous celebrities who have nothing to say, yet who support causes of some narcissistic kind or another (I must admit, though, that some of the causes seem just). And then there is the great pastime of all: the watching of television, which the Americans have spread around the globe in the form of personal channels and endless happy endings. There is no authentic work here, no kind of effort and expenditure of energy for something higher. The veery formation of thought is skilled, trade-like and flimsy. It is the least that we can do.
What's that? Nothing? You say nothing? Perhaps that's it.