I'm Glad that the Nazis Were Wrong About Landscape, Memory, and Destiny

The two great disappointments of my youth were, one, to be prevented by my religion, or by my devotion to it, from enjoying sex before marriage; and, two, to experience what pallid pleasures remained in the presence of the fluorescent glow of mere commerce: fast-food restaurants, billboards, the tawdry cheap come-ons of Speedway Boulevard, Tucson, Arizona. Somewhere I had read -I was always reading- of a youthful sexual fulfillment in a Provence summer night: the scent of thyme, the dusty grey-greens of an olive grove, the earthy scent of wine, the trilling of cicadas, the overhanging golden orb of the moon. These lent a dignity and heat to the passion of first sex that I was denied by crass and insipid geography. I was already angry at a forced move to the utter provinces, and Tucson's endless advertisement, its many square miles of barely-solvent small businesses and placeless big-box stores made my first love somehow cheap, puerile, disposable, slightly nauseating. I felt, to the considerable depths of my teenaged self, cheated and debased. And I imagined that my long future would be forever tainted. I would never be able to look back on stone houses, ancient groves, a settled legitimacy borrowed from Rome as the setting of the founding of my adulthood. I would instead have my roots in Burger King, Pep Boys, and Firestone. And I would be less for this impoverished soil.