COVER TO COVER

AMERICA AT 250: SEVEN LETTERS FROM ELSEWHERE

ITALO CALVINO, FRANZ KAFKA, CLARICE LISPECTOR, YUKIO MISHIMA, HEINER MÜLLER, DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ, AND NIRMAL VERMA

July 4, 2026

The United States turns 250 today. To mark the occasion, we invited Italo Calvino, Franz Kafka, Clarice Lispector, Yukio Mishima, Heiner Müller, Dubravka Ugrešić, and Nirmal Verma to reflect on America. The invitation was accepted with varying degrees of enthusiasm. For more than two centuries, visitors, immigrants, exiles, admirers, critics, and occasional enemies have attempted to describe the country. Each encountered a different America. Some found freedom, others loneliness. Some discovered possibility, others contradiction. No account ever settled the matter. The seven texts that follow continue this tradition. Their authors approach America from different directions, carrying different questions and preoccupations. Not surprisingly, they do not arrive at the same destination. The America they describe is sometimes familiar and sometimes strange. It is always unfinished.

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Every empire eventually becomes its own superhero.

MAXIMILIAN K. APPLIES FOR AMERICA

Franz Kafka

Maximilian K. arrived in America on a Tuesday. At least that was the date stamped on the document handed to him by a woman seated behind a glass partition at the Port Authority of Admission. The stamp was large and official. The date itself appeared uncertain.

“You arrived on Tuesday,” she said.

“It is Tuesday now.”

“Exactly.”

Maximilian K. wished to ask several questions, but the woman had already turned to the next applicant.

The building was enormous. It contained waiting rooms, corridors, elevators, cafeterias, consultation areas, assessment areas, and a Department of Preliminary Orientation whose purpose nobody seemed able to explain. Thousands of people moved through the structure carrying folders and identification cards. Some had evidently been there for years.

When Maximilian K. asked where the exit was, an employee directed him to an office on the forty-third floor. The office was responsible for departures. Unfortunately, departures could only be processed after admission, and Maximilian K. had not yet been admitted. He therefore remained.

Several days later, he received a notification informing him that his application for America had been accepted provisionally, pending confirmation that he was suitable for America. Suitable in what sense was not specified.

Nor did the accompanying brochure prove helpful. It contained photographs of smiling families standing in front of houses considerably larger than the houses visible through the building’s windows. One page featured a young man pointing enthusiastically at a graph. Another depicted an elderly couple laughing at something not visible in the image. Maximilian K. studied these materials carefully. They appeared less concerned with America than with anticipation. This observation returned to him repeatedly. Everywhere he looked, people seemed occupied by things that had not yet happened. A businessman spoke enthusiastically about a company that did not yet exist. A student discussed a career that had not yet begun. A politician promised improvements to circumstances that nobody appeared particularly dissatisfied with.

Even the advertisements seemed directed toward future versions of their audiences. “Become Better.” “Become More.” “Become Yourself.” The last instruction troubled Maximilian K. particularly because it implied that the recipients had not yet achieved the status of themselves. A week later he received another notice.

It informed him that his suitability for America had been confirmed. He was therefore invited to apply for membership in the Office of Suitability. The invitation appeared compulsory. At the appointed hour he presented himself before a long counter. Behind it sat three clerks. Their desks were empty except for small US flags and several stacks of forms. The first clerk requested identification. The second requested proof that the identification belonged to him. The third requested proof that the first two requests had been properly completed. Maximilian K. produced all the documents in his possession. The clerks examined them with evident satisfaction.

“You seem well prepared,” said the first.

“I have been carrying these papers since my arrival.”

The clerks exchanged approving glances.

“A promising sign,” said the second.

“For what?”

“For America.”

Maximilian K. wished to inquire further, but the interview had already concluded. In the following months he became accustomed to the country. Certain patterns emerged. Almost everyone appeared occupied by an application of some kind. Young men applied for success. Young women applied for happiness. Companies applied for growth. Universities applied for prestige. Politicians applied for the future. Even those who already possessed these things continued applying for larger versions of them. The process seemed endless.

One afternoon Maximilian K. found employment in an office responsible for evaluating applications submitted to another office. The work was straightforward. Each morning he received several hundred files. His task was to determine whether the applicants possessed the qualifications necessary to be evaluated.

“What happens after that?” he asked his supervisor.

“They are evaluated.”

“And then?”

“If successful, they may qualify for assessment.”

“What is the difference between evaluation and assessment?”

The supervisor regarded him sympathetically. “You are still new here.”

For the first time Maximilian K. noticed that many of his colleagues appeared exhausted. Their faces possessed a peculiar expression, as though they were perpetually approaching an important destination without ever drawing nearer to it. Yet they remained optimistic. This impressed him more than anything else. At lunch they discussed promotions not yet received, houses not yet purchased, vacations not yet taken, businesses not yet founded, books not yet written, and fortunes not yet accumulated. Their disappointments were always temporary because the future remained available for revision.

The future seemed unusually accommodating in America. Whenever it failed, another one immediately appeared.

One evening, while returning from work, Maximilian K. passed a large illuminated sign mounted above a building.

BECOME WHO YOU ARE.

The phrase troubled him. He stopped and read it again.

BECOME WHO YOU ARE.

The instruction appeared impossible. If one already was oneself, becoming was unnecessary. If one was not oneself, the instruction lacked practical guidance. Several passersby entered the building. Curious, Maximilian K. followed them. Inside he discovered an agency devoted entirely to self-improvement. Hundreds of people sat before screens receiving advice on how to become more productive, more successful, more authentic, more influential, more fulfilled, and, in certain cases, more themselves. No one seemed surprised by this. Maximilian K. remained until closing. As he left, a receptionist handed him a brochure.

“Have I enrolled?” he asked.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Then why am I receiving this?”

“Because you are eligible.”

“For what?”

She consulted a list. “For the possibility of qualification.”

That night, Maximilian K. stood outside the building and looked across the city. Thousands of windows glowed in the darkness. Somewhere behind them, millions of people were preparing for lives that had not yet begun. For the first time, he wondered whether America was not a country at all, but merely a waiting room located before one.

Repeating the word does not solve the question.

NOTES FOR AN AMERICAN RUIN

Heiner Müller

A worker stands in front of a machine. The machine has survived three economic systems and two wars. The worker has survived neither. The machine waits for instructions. The worker waits for retirement. Between them the screen glows. On the screen, a desert. In the desert, a convoy. Behind the convoy, a city. Behind the city, another desert. The geography of empire. Space occupied by movement. The twentieth century is over. Its dead continue to work.

The steelworker from Pittsburgh whose factory became a warehouse; the miner from the Ruhr whose mine became a museum; the collective farmer from Ukraine whose field became a commodity; the soldier from Baghdad whose war became a television series: They stand in line before the century like applicants before a closed office. The clerk has left. The forms remain.

America. A word from the future spoken in the past tense.

The immigrant arrives. The slave arrives. The investor arrives. The refugee arrives. The tourist arrives. The corpse arrives. Different centuries disembark from the same ship. The ocean is crossed again and again because history cannot remember that it has already happened.

The frontier moves west. The frontier moves into the factory. The frontier moves into the suburb. The frontier moves into the screen. There is always another frontier because the machine requires distance. When there is no distance left, it manufactures one.

A woman in Arizona waters her lawn. The water comes from a river that no longer reaches the sea. The sea receives plastic. The plastic receives sunlight. The sunlight receives the prayers of politicians. The chain of production is complete.

A television speaks. A president speaks. A corporation speaks. An algorithm speaks. The language changes. The voice remains.

In another century, a Roman administrator calculates grain shipments. In another, a British official counts ships in the harbor. In another, a Soviet planner studies production quotas. Today, a logistics manager follows containers across an ocean on a screen. Different costumes. The same insomnia.

The empire no longer occupies territories; it occupies time. The worker checks his phone before sleeping. The student checks her phone before sleeping. The banker checks his phone before sleeping. The unemployed man checks his phone before sleeping. The machine enters the dream before the dream begins. The colony has moved inward.

The old distinction between center and periphery collapses. The center consumes its own outskirts. Detroit resembles a province. Kabul resembles a province. Berlin resembles a province. The map folds into itself like a wound. History appears at the door disguised as weather. Floods. Fires. Storms. Heat.

The insurance company receives the report. The stock market receives the report. The government receives the report. History receives nothing. History keeps moving.

America at 250. Not a nation but an archive. A warehouse of promises. Some fulfilled, most deferred. The republic founded against empire discovers imperial functions. The revolution becomes administration. The administration becomes infrastructure. The infrastructure becomes landscape.

Night. The lights of the continent are visible from space—a constellation built by labor, debt, migration, war, electricity, speculation, hope. The dead look down upon it with professional interest. The future has arrived. It is busy preserving itself.

The national conversation, rendered in neon.

THE CITY THAT BELIEVED IT WAS A COUNTRY

Italo Calvino

There is a city on the western edge of a continent whose inhabitants know routes better than places. If you ask them where they live, they may answer with the name of a district, a street, or a neighborhood, but if you ask how they reach it, they will answer with certainty and at length. They will tell you which road to avoid in the morning, which interchange becomes impassable after sunset, where the traffic slows unexpectedly, where it accelerates, where it gathers itself before dispersing again. Listening to them, a visitor gradually understands that the true geography of the city is composed not of buildings, parks, rivers, or monuments, but of movements.

The city has no obvious center. Or rather, it possesses so many centers that the inhabitants eventually ceased looking for a single one. Each district contains a population convinced that the essential life of the city occurs there and only there. Near the ocean they believe the city is defined by the horizon. In the hills they believe it is defined by elevation. In the districts of commerce they believe it is defined by exchange. Elsewhere they insist it is defined by memory, labor, entertainment, language, ambition, or sunlight. Since all these claims can be supported by evidence, none can be dismissed. The city survives by allowing contradictory descriptions to remain simultaneously true.

Travelers often remark upon the city’s size. This is a mistake. The city is not remarkable because it is large. Many cities are large. What distinguishes it is that its distances do not separate one place from another. They generate the places themselves.

A woman leaves her house before dawn and spends an hour crossing the city to reach an office tower. Another leaves an apartment near the tower and spends the same hour traveling toward the neighborhood the first has just abandoned. Every morning thousands repeat this exchange. Their movements create invisible patterns stretching across the landscape like threads. The city exists inside these crossings as much as it exists in concrete or glass. If the movement ceased, many suspect the city would become unrecognizable, as a clock becomes unrecognizable when its hands stop.

The city is also famous for the images it produces. Every day images leave the city and travel to places whose inhabitants may never see the city itself. These images return transformed. A street appears more vivid than the street from which it originated. A house becomes more familiar than the house standing before it. A sunset acquires greater permanence than any actual evening. Over time the city accumulates so many versions of itself that no one can confidently distinguish the original from its representations.

Some inhabitants spend their entire lives inside one version of the city. Others move continually among several. They pass from the city of work to the city of entertainment, from the city of memory to the city of desire, from the city visible through a windshield to the city visible on a screen. Sometimes these cities overlap. More often they ignore one another.

For this reason, the cartographers of the city have never been satisfied. They produce maps in great numbers. Some emphasize roads. Others emphasize neighborhoods. Some emphasize water, others elevation, others population. Yet each map leaves something essential out. The map showing where people live cannot explain where they imagine themselves to be. The map showing property lines cannot explain aspiration. The map showing roads cannot explain longing. Every map is accurate and incomplete. One cartographer, after many years of study, proposed a solution: He would create a map large enough to contain every district, every road, every image, every memory, every dream, every future plan, every abandoned project, every conversation overheard in a café, every journey undertaken at dusk, every advertisement, every garden, every ambition, and every disappointment. Such a map, he believed, would finally reveal the city in its entirety. The work occupied decades. When it was completed, the map covered an area larger than the city itself. The inhabitants came to inspect it. They wandered across its surface searching for familiar places. They found roads, houses, neighborhoods, and landmarks. They found their own histories and those of strangers. Yet the longer they looked, the less certain they became. At last someone observed that the map did not resemble a city at all. It resembled a country. The cartographer examined his work and realized that the city had changed while he was drawing it. It had absorbed mountains, deserts, ports, valleys, languages, migrations, industries, fantasies, and generations. It contained so many different ways of living that no single description could contain it. The city had become too extensive to think of itself as a city and too restless to think of itself as a nation. It continued to call itself a city out of habit. The country continued to call itself a country for the same reason.

Where faith, money, and spectacle found common ground.

THE REPUBLIC OF YOUTH

Yukio Mishima

There are countries that derive their identity from memory. Their monuments commemorate victories and defeats. Their public squares preserve traces of earlier centuries. Their citizens carry history as a visible burden. One feels the weight of the dead in such places, not as an abstraction but as a daily presence. The past accompanies every gesture.

America has always struck me as a country organized around a different principle. It is less concerned with memory than with renewal. Its gaze is directed not behind it but ahead of it. The future occupies a position elsewhere reserved for history. This orientation reveals itself nowhere more clearly than in the American relationship to youth.

In many civilizations, youth is understood as a temporary condition. It is admired, perhaps even envied, but never mistaken for permanence. The young possess beauty because beauty has not yet become conscious of itself. They possess strength because strength has not yet encountered its limits. Their condition is moving toward an end, and it is this transience that gives it value.

America appears to have reached a different conclusion. Here youth is not a phase but an aspiration. A man of sixty seeks to appear fifty. A man of fifty seeks to appear forty. A woman of forty seeks to preserve the face of thirty. Entire industries exist to postpone the visible evidence of time. The body is treated less as a destiny than as a project. It must be improved, optimized, maintained, upgraded. One encounters a peculiar form of discipline whose purpose is not mastery but preservation.

At first glance, this ambition appears admirable. There is something undeniably attractive about a civilization unwilling to surrender itself passively to decline. The parks are filled with runners. The beaches with swimmers. The gyms with men and women engaged in endless acts of self-transformation. Everywhere one encounters the conviction that the body can be remade. Yet after some time, another question emerges: What becomes of a society that regards aging primarily as a failure? The question is not biological but spiritual.

Youth possesses many virtues, but among them is not wisdom. Youth acts. It expands. It conquers. It believes tomorrow will always contain greater possibilities than today. Such confidence can build cities, industries, and nations. America itself may be its greatest achievement. But civilizations, like individuals, eventually encounter limits. Mortality cannot be negotiated indefinitely. Time remains undefeated. The ancient Greeks understood this. So did the samurai. The body acquires meaning not despite its vulnerability but because of it. Strength matters because it passes. Beauty matters because it fades. Courage matters because death exists. The American dream of perpetual youth attempts to preserve the flower while denying the season. And yet I hesitate before condemning it. For there is something undeniably moving in this refusal. A civilization standing before the mirror and insisting that tomorrow remains possible. A people who continue to reinvent themselves long after older societies would have accepted their fate. The impulse contains vanity, certainly, but also hope.

Perhaps this is why America continues to fascinate the world. It has transformed youth from a biological stage into a political principle. The nation itself behaves as though it remains unfinished, forever approaching its ideal form, forever preparing for a future that has not yet arrived. At two hundred and fifty years old, America remains the youngest old country on Earth. Whether this is a strength or a weakness, I cannot say. Like youth itself, it may be both.

Wrapped in the flag, obscured by the image.

THE WOMAN BUYING ORANGES

Clarice Lispector

The woman was buying oranges. Or perhaps she was only standing before them. The distinction seemed important at first and then less so. The oranges were arranged in careful pyramids beneath a light that made them appear more orange than oranges ordinarily do. Someone had decided that oranges should glow. The woman wondered briefly who that person might have been and then immediately forgot the question, as one forgets many questions that arise in supermarkets. She picked up an orange. It was heavier than she expected. This surprised her. She had held oranges throughout her life and yet had apparently forgotten their weight. The fruit rested in her hand with a seriousness that seemed disproportionate to its size. She turned it slowly. There was nothing unusual about it. The peel was intact. Its color was reassuring. It promised exactly what it contained.

Around her, people continued shopping. Carts moved past. Refrigerators hummed. Somewhere a child was asking for something. Somewhere else a voice announced a special offer. The sounds merged into a single atmosphere of mild urgency, as though everyone present had been given a task and was now attempting to complete it. The woman looked at the display. There were many kinds of oranges. Navel oranges. Valencia oranges. Organic oranges. Imported oranges. Local oranges. Large oranges. Small oranges. Oranges sold individually and oranges sold in bags. She tried to remember whether oranges had always existed in such variety or whether variety itself had become a product. She realized that she did not particularly want an orange. What she wanted was less clear.

The thought embarrassed her slightly. It seemed unreasonable to expect clarity from a supermarket. The place offered products, not revelations. Yet standing there she experienced a brief sensation that the rows of fruits, vegetables, bottles, boxes, cartons, and packages extended beyond practical necessity into another realm entirely. The abundance possessed a strangeness; it was generous and exhausting at the same time. She put the orange back. Immediately she picked up another. This one was lighter. The difference pleased her for reasons she could not explain.

A man reached across the display and selected six oranges without hesitation. His certainty fascinated her. How had he done it? Had he compared them, examined them? Did he possess secret knowledge unavailable to her? Or had he simply accepted that no orange could justify prolonged reflection? The woman smiled. For a moment she imagined a life in which every decision was made with such confidence. A life in which one moved through the world selecting fruit, professions, lovers, cities, and beliefs with the same uncomplicatedness. Then she understood that the man might simply be in a hurry. This possibility disappointed her. The orange remained in her hand.

Its surface contained tiny imperfections. Small marks. Slight variations in color. Nothing remarkable. Yet she found herself looking at it as though she had never truly seen an orange before. It had traveled from somewhere. A grove. A truck. A warehouse. A distribution center. Another truck. A storeroom. Finally this display beneath artificial light. Hundreds of people had participated in its journey. None of them knew her. She knew none of them. Yet all of them had contributed to this moment. The realization produced a faint dizziness. Not because it was profound, but because it was ordinary. The supermarket seemed suddenly transformed into a map of invisible relationships. Every shelf represented distances crossed. Every object contained landscapes she had never visited and people she would never meet. The building was filled with arrivals. She looked around. No one appeared astonished by this.

The customers continued examining labels, comparing prices, and consulting shopping lists. Their calm suggested that they inhabited this miracle daily and had therefore ceased to notice it. The woman felt an unexpected tenderness toward them. She imagined that America might be something like this. Not the flags she occasionally passed, not the speeches she occasionally heard, not even the roads stretching endlessly beyond the city. Perhaps it was this strange confidence that abundance could be organized, transported, illuminated, refrigerated, arranged, and made available at precisely the moment someone desired it. And perhaps, she thought, the loneliness came from the same source. Everything was available. Everything except necessity.

The woman finally selected an orange and placed it in her cart. She continued shopping. A few minutes later she could no longer remember why she had chosen that particular one. Yet the orange accompanied her. When she reached the parking lot, it was still there, resting among the other purchases, carrying within it a sweetness that neither she nor anyone else could know in advance. This uncertainty comforted her. Not everything, she realized, had been organized.

A correction still waiting to be fully understood.

A ROOM IN NEW MEXICO

Nirmal Verma

By the time he arrived in New Mexico, evening had already begun to settle over the desert. The woman at the reception desk handed him a key attached to a piece of faded plastic, pointed toward a row of identical doors facing the parking lot, and wished him a pleasant stay. He thanked her. Although both knew he would be gone by morning, there was something curiously reassuring about such encounters. In a foreign country one often formed brief relationships that existed entirely outside memory. The woman would forget him before the end of her shift. He would forget her name before reaching California. Yet for a few moments, they had occupied the same small corner of the world and exchanged the ordinary courtesies by which strangers acknowledge one another’s existence. The room itself was unremarkable. Had he seen it twenty years earlier, or ten years later, he might not have noticed any difference. A narrow bed stood against the wall. A chair had been placed beside the window. The curtains carried a pattern whose original colors had faded from long exposure to sunlight. Beyond the parking lot stretched the desert, and beyond the desert, mountains whose outlines grew softer as daylight disappeared. He sat down near the window without switching on the lamp. For a long time he simply watched the landscape darken. What struck him was not the unfamiliarity of the place but its unexpected intimacy. The desert bore no resemblance to the mountains among which he had spent his childhood. The air was different. The vegetation was different. Even the silence was different. Yet as he looked through the window, he experienced the peculiar sensation that accompanies certain moments during travel when distance ceases to behave logically and places separated by thousands of miles begin to occupy the same interior space. The mountains outside the motel seemed to awaken memories not of themselves but of another landscape entirely. He found himself thinking of Shimla, of evenings when mist moved slowly across the hills, obscuring familiar paths and houses until the world appeared suspended between presence and disappearance. It occurred to him that one rarely remembers places as they actually were. What remains is usually a room, a window, a fragment of conversation, the angle at which light entered through a doorway on a particular afternoon. Entire cities disappear while a single chair remains vivid. Prague had survived in his memory not through its churches or bridges but through a small apartment overlooking a courtyard where snow accumulated during winter. London survived through a window streaked with rain. Delhi through the sound of traffic heard late at night from an upper floor. Perhaps every journey eventually reduced itself to a room and the consciousness that had once occupied it. As darkness settled over the desert, he became aware of a loneliness that was neither unpleasant nor entirely his own. It seemed woven into the landscape itself. America often appeared to him as a country built upon movement. People crossed enormous distances with a casualness that would have astonished earlier generations. Children settled thousands of miles from their parents. Friendships survived across continents. Entire lives unfolded between departures and arrivals. Yet the room suggested another America, one less visible than highways or cities. The America of temporary dwellings, of motel rooms, rented apartments, student residences, and hotel corridors. A country inhabited not only by those who had arrived but by those who remained in transit, carrying fragments of other lives and other geographies within them. When he finally switched on the lamp, the window became a mirror. The desert vanished, and in its place appeared the reflection of the room, the bed, the chair, the suitcase resting beside the wall. For a moment he could not tell whether he was looking outward or inward. Perhaps, he thought, this confusion lay at the heart of all travel. One departs in search of another place and discovers instead a different perspective upon the places one has already left behind.

The republic celebrates itself, with complications.

FORGOTTEN THINGS

Dubravka Ugrešić

In every storage facility there are forgotten things. Officially, of course, they have not been forgotten at all. Their owners continue paying monthly fees to ensure their survival. The boxes remain labeled. The contracts remain active. The locks remain in place. Yet anyone who has ever wandered through one of these endless corridors understands that the distinction is largely bureaucratic. The objects have not been abandoned, but nor do they participate in daily life. They exist in a peculiar state between possession and disappearance.

What interests me is not the objects themselves but the processes by which they arrive there. A dining table around which a family once gathered every evening. Boxes of photographs someone intended to organize one day. Children’s toys preserved long after the children have grown up. Winter coats waiting for winters that never arrive. None of these things become forgotten suddenly. Their exile is gradual. First they move from the center of a room to its edges. Then to a closet, a basement, a garage. Finally they arrive here, among thousands of other displaced objects, each carrying a history that remains intact but increasingly inaccessible. They have not lost their owners. They have merely lost their place in the world.

America appears unusually skilled at accommodating this transformation. Perhaps this is because the country itself is organized around movement. Airports, highways, warehouses, distribution centers, hotel chains, storage facilities, rental cars, shopping malls, and online retailers form a vast infrastructure dedicated to circulation. People arrive. People depart. Goods arrive. Goods depart. Information arrives and departs so quickly that it often seems to vanish before anyone has fully received it. The nation functions less like a settlement than a system of perpetual transit.

One encounters this phenomenon everywhere. During my travels I became fascinated with self-storage facilities. They appeared beside highways, on the outskirts of cities, near suburban developments, and in industrial districts. The buildings themselves were unremarkable. What interested me was their purpose. Thousands of people paid monthly fees to preserve objects they no longer used but could not entirely abandon. Furniture, boxes, photographs, documents, clothing, collections, souvenirs. The contents varied. The impulse remained consistent.

At first I regarded this as a peculiarly American habit. Later I recognized it as something else. Exiles understand storage. Not necessarily the rented variety, but the principle behind it. Every exile carries invisible storage rooms. Languages no longer spoken. Streets no longer visited. Friends no longer seen. Political systems that vanished while one was elsewhere. Songs remembered imperfectly. Addresses whose buildings may no longer exist. One accumulates abandoned worlds and continues paying emotional rent on them long after practical necessity has disappeared. A country is not unlike a storage unit. The observation may sound unpatriotic. It is not intended that way. Nations preserve things. They preserve victories, defeats, myths, grievances, heroes, symbols, and stories. Some of these remain useful. Others remain merely present. The difficulty lies in distinguishing between the two.

America, now two hundred and fifty years old, possesses an unusually crowded storage room. The nation stores revolutions, civil wars, migrations, frontiers, factories, plantations, suburbs, highways, dreams of prosperity, dreams of equality, dreams of reinvention. New generations continue adding material but rarely discarding anything. As a result, the archive expands indefinitely. During one journey I visited a thrift store in a small town whose name I have forgotten. The shelves contained objects from hundreds of unknown lives. Wedding albums. Framed photographs. Holiday decorations. Kitchen utensils. School trophies. A stranger’s handwritten notes tucked inside a cookbook. Nothing was valuable. Yet everything had once mattered.

I spent an hour wandering among these relics. What struck me was not their sadness but their persistence. The people had disappeared from the story. The objects remained. Perhaps this is why forgotten things exert such fascination. They survive the narratives that once explained them. A photograph remains after the marriage ends. A souvenir remains after the journey has been forgotten. A language survives in a phrase long after fluency has vanished. An object continues existing even when its meaning has become uncertain. The same may be true of nations.

At two hundred and fifty years old, America contains countless forgotten things. Some deserve recovery. Others deserve rest. Many no longer reveal whether they belong to memory or mythology. Yet they persist, stored somewhere in the national imagination, waiting to be encountered by accident. The storage unit, the thrift store, the archive, the nation itself: all are repositories of objects and stories that once occupied the center of someone’s life and now wait quietly at the edge of attention. Most will never be reclaimed. Their value lies elsewhere. They remind us that forgetting is not the opposite of memory. It is one of its forms.

A national self-portrait in five words.

Italo Calvino (born Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, October 15, 1923; died Siena, Italy, September 19, 1985) was a cartographer of invisible territories and collector of unfinished systems. He once spent three years studying a city that may not have existed.

Franz Kafka (born Prague, July 3, 1883; died Kierling, Austria, June 3, 1924) worked briefly in insurance and considerably longer in misunderstanding. He claimed never to have visited the United States, though several US office buildings insist otherwise.

Clarice Lispector (born Chechelnyk, Ukraine, December 10, 1920; died Rio de Janeiro, December 9, 1977) arrived in Brazil before her language had fully caught up with her. She once devoted an entire afternoon to observing an egg.

Yukio Mishima (born Tokyo, January 14, 1925; died Tokyo, November 25, 1970) was a novelist, actor, bodybuilder, and unsuccessful opponent of time. He believed that beauty should be taken seriously, and that politics should occasionally be treated as literature.

Heiner Müller (born Eppendorf, Germany, January 9, 1929; died Berlin, December 30, 1995) was a playwright and amateur archaeologist of collapsing empires. He frequently mistook the future for a historical document.

Dubravka Ugrešić (born Kutina, Yugoslavia, March 27, 1949; died Amsterdam, March 17, 2023) was an essayist, exile, and collector of cultural debris. She developed an early interest in airports, footnotes, and things that no longer belong anywhere.

Nirmal Verma (born Shimla, British India, April 3, 1929; died New Delhi, October 25, 2005) was a novelist of memory, distance, and rooms occupied by absent people. He spent much of his life crossing borders and wondering whether anyone ever truly arrives.

Images

1. Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954–55

2.  Jack Kirby, Captain America, 1940

3. Glenn Ligon, Untitled (America), 1996

4. Bruce Nauman, American Violence, 1981–82

5. Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Wall Street, 1939

6. David Hammons, America the Beautiful, 1968

7. Alfredo Jaar, A Logo for America, 1987

8. Kerry James Marshall, Bang, 1994

9. Robert Indiana, Decade (USA 666), 1971

Cover image: The image that replaced the object.