The distinction between memory and custom can be elaborated by adding a further distinction between action and behavior. Whereas every action is unique and idiosyncratic, behavior falls into patterns that repeat themselves in a predictable fashion. Action, whether it is reckless and impulsive or deliberate and discriminating, is the product of judgment, choice, and free will, whereas behavior is automatic and reflexive. Action is aware of itself; behavior, habitual and unconscious. Thus custom resembles the "air we breathe in," as Burke put it, operating on people "insensibly." Action is the capacity to initiate, as Hannah Arendt has pointed out, to make a new beginning. Behavior sticks to the beaten path. Action has unpredictable consequences, often at odds with those intended. Behavior, on the other hand, obeys measurable laws, analogous to physical laws of motion. If we think of men and women as creatures of circumstance and habit, we will tend to minimize the role of ideas and initiative in history, stressing instead the "secret, unseen, but irrefragable bond of habitual intercourse," in Burke's words—the "customs, manners, and habits of life" that "approximate men to men without their knowledge." If we think of men and women essentially as moral agents, we are more likely to be impressed with the ironic disjunction between intentions and results, with the capacity of the human will to free itself from natural limitations, and at the same time with its inclination to overreach itself and to wreak destruction in the attempt to dominate its surroundings.

In our analysis of nostalgia, we saw that literary representations of small-town life often fall into a kind of sociological style of thought, concerning themselves with the repetitive cycle of births, marriages, and deaths. In other words, they concern themselves with behavior as opposed to action. As Arendt has shown, the concept of behavior is closely linked, in turn, to the concept of society, since the social realm is distinguished from the political by the absence of conscious determination, the tenacity of customs and rituals the original significance of which has been lost to memory, and the accumulated weight of habits highly resistant to

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