Angle of Repose

Thanks to @pryor16 we've begun to read Wallace Stegner's 1971 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Angle of Repose. An insight worth quoting from the cantankerous narrator:

I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can't go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.

A paragraph later:

The moderns [we Boomers], carrying little baggage of the kind that [1960s flower child] Shelly called "merely cultural" ... Their circuitry seems to include no atavistic domestic sentiment, they have suffered empathectomy, their computer hum no ghostly feedback of Home, Sweet Home. How marvelously free they are! How unutterably deprived!