WASHINGTON – There are happier stories about those who travel the nation trying to find buyers for their wares than Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” Just ask Marc J. Dunkelman.
In an essay in the summer issue of The Hedgehog Review, Dunkelman recalls a conversation two decades ago with his grandfather, a retired salesman, about how people discover good restaurants. Dunkelman was enthusing about then-developing technologies that would widely share information on great eateries and even tell people about how to get to the ones located nearby.
His grandfather wasn’t impressed. On his sales trips, he said, he regularly sought out “a friendly looking stranger” to learn where he might find a decent bite to eat. In the process, he would often make a new friend and see him again on a return visit.
“That’s how I got to understand the world – by talking to strangers,” the older man said. “With all these fancy technologies you’re telling me about, how are people going to get to know one another? You ask me, I think it’s going to make everyone lonely.”
Dunkelman, a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, is no Luddite when it comes to technology. But the author of the 2014 book “The Vanishing Neighbor” has a healthy obsession with how people connect with each other (or fail to), and his essay asks an important question: In the great revival of cities we are seeing all over our country, are we creating places “where neighbors remain strangers”? Are we thus robbing ourselves of “the crucial ingredient of a thriving American community”? Are we building great places to live (at least for those who can afford them) that are not actually neighborhoods?