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Very early on a February morning I sat outside contemplating the stars, especially Draco and Serpens, Arcturus, Mira, and Spica. The sky was clear, the breeze balmy. Except for the soft rhythms of waves coming to shore, the earth seemed still. I saw two shooting stars. In this moment of reverie I was considerably surprised when, quite involuntarily, a vivid image of a Wal-Mart came to mind. Not Wal-Mart generally, but the specific WalMart in my hometown on Atherton Street. I shop there occasionally and often with reluctance. It is so fluorescently bright, especially early in the morning or late at night when it has the advantages of few customers and a mood approaching leisure. A glare presents the things on the shelves, things arranged not by color and size so much as by functional classifications: clothing, then shoes, then shoes for different purposes: work shoes, children ’s shoes . . . : things arranged conveniently according to the economies of homes and work, of kitchens, garages, medicine cabinets, entertainment centers, nurseries, decks, and backyards. Things are everywhere, all shelved, displayed, tagged, coded, and ready to be checked out, unpackaged, spread out, assembled, plugged in—used. These arrangements are presented in a glare of light that, combined with the withering number of things (over fifty thousand of them in our Wal-Mart; Super Wal-Marts have seventy thousand different types of things), sometimes leaves me light-headed and on a drift to dizziness. When I go there, I prefer short and highly focused trips. So why in the world was Wal-Mart a constellation in my mind in this blissful darkness, creating a most singular experience in the middle of my reverie? ELEVEN Wal-Mart and the Heavens: The Factor of Indifference  . . . if eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being. —R. W. Emerson Among many possibilities for this association, I emphasize the obvious: antiphrasis, radicality of difference. Never mind the hellfire that is going on in the stars’ vicinity. From my vantage point they gave a serenity of light with darkness made all the more drawing for contemplation by calm, warm air and the ocean’s rhythmic pounding. Nothing felt especially functional at that time. Nothing glared. Nothing was packaged, especially as I watched and lost all sense of names, without a cart in which to carry picked celestial bodies. Nothing at that time appeared in bondage to human economy: Everything I saw presented itself in considerable excess to the name I applied to it. Indeed, I felt as though part of my sensibility inhabited and was inhabited by a region without name or human dimension. So when the WalMart entered the picture, my fusion with the heavens underwent a marked confusion. The reclining, plastic, and rustproof chair on which I lay did indeed come from the no-less-glaring environment of a Wal-Mart-like Home Depot . The house to which the chair belonged was largely built and furnished by purchases that were carted to checkout stands, earlier having been loaded by huge cranes into boats’ holds that were filled with noxious air, amidst an uproar of people and equipment, before being loaded by forklifts onto pallets and trucks. My dreamy moment was historically and socially conditioned by computers, multiple exchanges of money and labor, the laws of many nations (“Made in China,” “Made in Malaysia,” “Made in USA”), many complexes of workers, trading companies, wholesale and retail establishments , and individuals (some with retirement and health benefits, some with corporate bonuses, and some with less than a dollar an hour and no individual freedom), all on the earth and under the stars. On that morning I did not think of these things, or of airports and airplanes and traveling schedules. I simply contemplated, underwent a complex , additional, and unwelcomed sense of Wal-Mart, and saw the quick flash of another shooting star. Wal-Mart, like McDonald’s, has a bad reputation among some people. Its range of selection and low prices destroy small local businesses. Its builders pour millions of pounds of gravel and asphalt over fields that once produced food, provided grazing for farm animals, or simply were open space and sanctuary for plant and animal lives. Its policies cultivate a lowpaid , rapid-turnover workforce. It is housed in buildings without beauty or elegance. Its mass-produced goods erase the value of the artisan in favor of the price for styles and goods that are the same in Seminole, Oklahoma , Detroit, Michigan, or Buenos...

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