There’s a famous quote from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice where Caroline Bingley, the stuck-up younger sister of one of the novel’s heroes – Charles Bingley – speaks with disapproval about an upcoming dance, and her brother responds:
“’I should like balls infinitely better,’ she replied, ‘if they were carried on in a different manner; but there is something insufferably tedious in the usual process of such a meeting. It would surely be much more rational if conversation instead of dancing were made the order of they day.’
‘Much more rational, my dear Caroline, I dare say, but it would not be near so much like a ball.”
This quote gets trotted out to argue against changing a lot of things. Most famously, C. S. Lewis used it to argue against ordaining women; despite my great love for Lewis as a prose stylist and the dear place of Narnia in my heart, I do wish he had not written those two particular paragraphs. But tonight, like the good Gen X-er I am, I am thinking not about women’s ordination, but about shopping malls.
One of the things about being an old person on Instagram is that you run into a lot of people who are a lot younger than you who have developed a great love for the 1980s – during which they were not alive, but you were. I have ended up following a lot of accounts where people wear 80s clothes, listen to (and even record) 80s music, and go around filming 80s shopping malls.
A lot of malls are abandoned now, of course. Some of the others still exist, but their stores are mostly empty or else filled with storefront churches, insurance agents, Spirit Halloween, and other things that don’t really recall my childhood spent wandering among the pleasantly air-conditioned potted plants and piped-in Muzak. A few years ago, I took my kids to the mall in my hometown where I had spent much of my childhood (actually, to one of the malls in my hometown; the other was demolished in 2004 and replaced with an outdoor set of “shoppes”). I was able to show my daughter the very Claire’s where I had gotten my ears pierced, which amazingly was (and is) still open. But it and Sbarro Pizza were about all that was left.
Anyway, this is more about culture than it is about work, although it is also about our conception of the common good and how it changes. At one point, confining vast quantities of (mostly) teenagers in an artificially constructed but fairly safe environment fit who we were as a country. (That, of course, replaced the town squares and Main Streets and soda foundations of my parents’ teenage experience.) Then we knocked everything down and went back outdoors. Then we stopped going outdoors and went online. (Although, if I can believe stock photo websites, there are actually still a lot more flourishing shopping malls outside the US. I’ve certainly visited one in Aberdeen multiple times that appears to be thriving.)
I’m too old for ear piercings now, not to mention food-court food, stonewashed jeans, hours to kill in the afternoon, and dancing. But I would kind of like to aimlessly ride the elevator up and down, wander through Sears and look at lawnmowers and cubic zirconia rings and blazers and miniskirts and backyard swimming pools, stop into Radio Shack to get batteries, pick up another pair of novelty earrings, and finish up with a cup of frozen yogurt and a slice of truly inedible pizza. . . one more time.
Photo by Igor Karimov �� on Unsplash
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