Optimistic About Nothing

However, American culture is by nature more upbeat, more optimistic than European culture, more about opportunity than about our lost philosophical bearings, so it tends to think differently about our lost center. It is naturally more hopeful. It therefore stares not so much at the void as at the prospect of a Caribbean vacation, at the high-end catalogs, the upward move, and the new Lexus. Europeans might still see themselves in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Americans are more inclined to while away the time by watching something distracting or amusing. Maybe Seinfeld. This brilliantly acted television show was, by its own reckoning, a show about nothing. Beckett's world, too, was a world in which Nothing reigned. Here are two streets that end up at the same destination, one at a highbrow level and the other at, well, a lowbrow level. But Beckett's was nastier.

-David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant, 110.