A Celebration of the Immigrant Melting Pot
The Human Comedy is one of those types of books whose popularity waxes and wanes due to the mood of the country rather than because of its story. Harking back to ancient Greek myths, the story is painted in those kinds of broad strokes that makes it accessible to vast cross-section of readers, but the author’s uncensored and unshakeable belief that immigration is the single element most responsible for making America great means that the early decades of the 21st century is destined to be one of down period. That’s okay, however, because the early decades of the 20th century was marked by pretty much the same kind of anti-immigrant sentiment, yet by the 1943 American was ready to make it almost a national treasure. That sentiment didn’t hold as a result of regressions to bad habits, but then the country gets right again and is ready to join along with Mr. Spangler’s abound enthusiasm for “Greeks, Serbs, Poles, Russians, Mexicans, Armenians, Germans, Negroes, Swedes, Spaniards, Basques, Portuguese, Italians, Jews, French, English, Scotch, Irish. You name it. That’s who we are.”
Accepting All That Which Occurs Naturally
Or, as Ulysses phrases it in resonant mimicry of the philosophical foundation of the Transcendentalists, saying yes to all things. The novel is a portrait of American at one of its lowest points standing on the precipice of uncertainty drive by an optimistic confidence that the best that was yet to come stood just around the corner. The novel suggests that in certain ways the onset of Great Depression became as inevitable as America’s entry into a second world war. The power to accept those thing which are inevitable as a result of naturally converging is not just the key to attaining wisdom, but the key to discovering happiness even when the darker aspects of natural mechanics must be accepted.
Love and Family
All that survives in the end is love and family. Families have a natural bond capable of keeping them together on some level even when the love is lost, but every family benefits by learning to accept the flaws of other members in order to make the bond even stronger. The importance of loving one’s neighbor is implicitly and explicitly linked to families whose bonds suffer dysfunction. Inevitably, the most damaging consequence of a lack of love within families is the growth of fear that would otherwise have been contained by acts of love. For this reason, the book strongly suggests, we must go out of our way to show kindness and affection to strangers, so many of who react in a way that is merely a disguise to keep from revealing themselves as still being frightened little children.
