I know that I said this at the time because it’s something that I have often said, and often felt. In a world where every party is a Facebook party—meaning that it comes with expectations about the public advertising and dispersal of essentially private acts—the idea of self-promotion starts to operate with the pernicious force of routine. But, over the years, I have worked to understand and see that routinization as a side effect of what life in a hyperconnected world looks like, and not as a worthy or desirable end in itself. The point is not to work toward self-promotion but to discover ways to live within a system that favors self-promotional tendencies while still carving out a space for what feels genuine and real. This is what I was trying to communicate to my colleague who, apparently, took personal offense at what I was saying.

Between McCullers and Green, then, we have two snapshots of what it was like to party in the year 1939, in the midst of the Great Depression, or the “Great Slump” as it was known in England. Though ostensibly quite different, and with a whole ocean separating their respective authors, these two novels engage in a simultaneous and historically specific contemplation of hanging out, something akin to what Raymond Williams calls a “structure of feeling.” Williams uses this term to identify artistic works that express a similar historical worldview, or else encapsulate and respond to a shared set of “palpable pressures,” as he calls them. A structure of feeling unites two artistic works though the artists or authors in question may have nothing in common and no working knowledge of each other.

[...] These stories would spin out and hook up with others, like the one about the time when Paul got caught by a blizzard on I-89 and spent the better part of a day trapped in his car in the company of a bunch of his own graduate students. These were stories of other times and other parties, essentially, but they served to kindle a new and deeper kind of intimacy. They helped to make us see that this party, our party, was the offspring of all those past parties and thus connected in a long chain of faded social linkages.