I do not refer here to the artificial foot developed recently for the purpose of sweating mechanically in the service of a shoe manufacturer, or to the common Elvis impersonator, but rather to the ineffable issue of personal identity. A recent survey by Fodor's Travel Publications revealed that three percent of American travelers invent completely new personae for themselves when talking to strangers on planes, buses, and trains. The debate over the relative merits of the actual and the contrived is an ancient one, filled with censorious voices. This is not a debate I care to join. But it is perhaps worth wondering, against a background of simulation, whether mundane reality may itself be emerging as something that can be considered radically avant-garde.
Several signs are suggestive.
Another article in the same section reports that members of cutting-edge households are putting photographs of family members into frames and then making arrangements of the photographs on a wall. From a different newspaper comes a story about people forsaking conventional psychotherapy and, as psychologists look on with guarded hope, seeking emotional well-being by telling humorous stories to friends and then joining in the laughter. A taste for the honest and elemental, if only as a garnish, is evident on a wide front. A recently published catalogue offers household appliances from fifty or a hundred years ago that operate without electricity. There are bars that serve only water to drink, and other bars that serve only oxygen to breathe.