The culture proclaims today Black Friday. After our day of obligatory gratitude, we resume are quest for stuff to give to impress our friends, family and acquaintances with our shopping savvy or good taste, or the closest approximation of love our bruised and battered hearts are capable of.

I’m sitting in a lobby or sitting room of a bed and breakfast or hotel or inn in Corolla, North Carolina . I had a muffin and container of yoghurt at their breakfast bar. The breakfast, such as it is, comes with the room. The people hanging around are pleasant enough. There is a dog, a yellow Lab bitch, going on with her doggy life, being adorable and friendly.

I just heard Bob Dylan sing, Don’t Think Twice or whatever the title is. We’ve come a long way from William Faulkner, as Nobel laureates go.

This place is a bourgeois Walhalla. Having fought our figurative Agincourt, we retire to this Demi- paradise, this earth, this realm, these Outer Banks. Shakespeare was working when these parts were first explored. It took four hundred years to turn this beachhead into a suburb, but we’ve succeeded.

And it’s really not bad. Americans have mastered comfort, bountiful food, warm houses, fast cars, jet planes.

The empty part is our own problem. Don’t think too much and enjoy the free breakfast.