Nehaveigur

Wallace Stegner in Wolf Willow:

The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of noble savagery and freedom of the wild. Anyone who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world.

A little later:

[The question is whether any pioneer town] can hope to develop to a sate of civilization as high as that which some of its founders abandoned – whether those pioneers who were educated men did not give up a heritage of some richness to become part of a backwater peasantry incapable of the feeblest cultural aspiration. If that answer to that question is yes, if generations of children are to grow up without architecture, art, theatre, dance, music, or conversation, and if at the same time the charm of savagery is systematically reduced by the uglification we call progress, then the only alternatives for the intelligent and talented young will be frustration or escape.