As any parent or pet-owner knows, play seems to be a natural part of life. Dogs and cats wrestle, chase their tails, and scamper in races; monkeys, fish, and birds dance; children make toys out of any nearby prop. Play is older than man and seems to be one of the inevitable characteristics that evolution has built into all beings above the level of the most basic species. Both quiet play and active play – leisure and recreation – have a therapeutic effect that make creatures seek them. Play is ubiquitous psychologists say, because fun is essential in order to do the serious things of life – work, survive, reproduce, and live in social groups. Why then does it jar our sensibilities to think of Puritans playing and having fun? Why is it necessary to remind people – to persuade them against their instinctive reaction – that the religious settlers of colonial New England sought relaxation and pleasure in their lives? Many societies past and present have reputations for restrictive views of the pursuit of pleasure, but few peoples conjure up as strong an image of asceticism as the Puritans do.

Lionel Trilling is generally regarded as one of the most important American critics self-consciously indebted to Matthew Arnold's idea of critical humanism. But his legacy draws little interest now that humanism has presumably been “unmasked” in academic circles to reveal the various political agendas beneath its program of disinterested idealism. For many critics on the Left, he is remembered, in Cornel West's phrase, as “the godfather of neo-conservatism,” and perhaps a precursor of such recent advocates of the humanities as Allan Bloom and former Secretary of Education William Bennett. Much of this is doubtless due to Trilling's opposition to the general tenor of the 1960s counter-culture, some of whose participants are now today's academic cultural critics. But if Trilling is to be remembered as a kind of mandarin apologist for “high culture,” he should be remembered as a very troubled and ambivalent one.

When, on his way back to Manhattan from Kennedy Airport where he has picked up his girlfriend Maria, Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, takes a wrong exit, he gets lost and ends up in the Bronx. This is Sherman's first meeting with the Bronx, and it turns out to be nothing less than a catastrophe. A wealthy Wall Street stockbroker with a very WASP background, Sherman McCoy has lived his life under conditions as remote from those of any child growing up in the Bronx as can possibly be. The distance between McCoy's Manhattan – that of his business address, Wall Street, as well as his private one, Fifth Avenue – and the Bronx may not be great in geographical terms; in economic and psychological terms, however, it is enormous. In the Bronx, McCoy encounters “the other” America, the poor, non-white, and violent America from which his sheltered background has successfully shielded him until he is well into his thirties. He, or rather his girlfriend Maria, runs down and mortally wounds a young black man – an accident for which later Sherman gets all the blame and is put to trial. Puzzled and frightened, Sherman does not quite know how to relate to the Bronx and to the accident, and it is Maria who finally has to enlighten and explain to him what it is all about:

Sherman, let me tell you something. There's two kinds a jungles. Wall Street is a jungle. You've heard that, haven't you? You know how to handle yourself in that jungle…. And then there's the other jungle. That's the one we got lost in the other night, in the Bronx…. You don't live in that jungle, Sherman, and you never have. You know what's in that jungle? People who are all the time crossing back and forth, back and forth, from this side of the law to the other side…. You don't know what that's like. You had a good upbringing. Laws weren't any kind of a threat to you. They were your laws, Sherman, people like you and your family's…. And let me tell you something else. Right there on the line everyody's an animal – the police, the judges, the criminals, everybody (p. 275).