He loved windows full of hammers, saws, and planing boards.

From The Hills Beyond by Thomas Wolfe.  Page 2-3.  A Christmas gift from a near and dear couple.  

Not much of a fiction reader but I loved these evocative passages of retail in a small town in the 1930s.  I have known such places around the world even in these more modern times.  I have walked into such squares as described below in England, in America, in Australia, and in the Apennines of Italy; at least.  With Wolfe, though, it is not just a nostalgia for small town retail.  There is a reminder of a world more solid, more present, more real and it comes through perhaps strongest in his description of the hardware store.  You can virtually smell it - wood, oil, metal, creosote, hemp rope.  All so real, solid, present.

Today, all the pieces are packaged away in cardboard, paper and plastic.  The feel is missing, the heft, the touch, the smell, the weight of the thing.  We live in an increasingly virtual world, a disinfected world, a deracinated world, and even hardware stores are removing that sense of the real and the present.  Wolfe reminds us.  

It seemed to him that the Square, itself the accidental masonry of many years, the chance agglomeration of time and of disrupted strivings, was the center of the universe. It was for him, in his soul’s picture, the earth’s pivot, the granite core of changelessness, the eternal place where all things came and passed, and yet abode forever and would never change.

[snip]

 

He passed on then, but had to stop again next door before the music store. He always had to stop by places that had shining perfect things in them. He loved hardware stores and windows full of accurate geometric tools. He loved windows full of hammers, saws, and planing boards. He liked windows full of strong new rakes and hoes, with unworn handles, of white perfect wood, stamped hard and vivid with the maker’s seal. He loved to see such things as these in the windows of hardware stores. And he would fairly gloat upon them and think that some day he would own a set himself.

Also, he always stopped before the music and piano store. It was a splendid store. And in the window was a small white dog upon his haunches, with head cocked gravely to one side, a small white dog that never moved, that never barked, that listened attentively at the flaring funnel of a horn to hear “His Master’s Voice”—a horn forever silent, and a voice that never spoke. And within were many rich and shining shapes of great pianos, an air of splendor and of wealth.

This afternoon I come across an even more striking example of a writer's ability to pull us into their world which we also then recognize as our world.  The Thomas Wolfe of Classical Greece - Theophrastus.  From On Moral Characters by Theophrastus (Greece, 371--287 BC).  This is his caricature of a Man of Petty Ambition, set in Athens.  James Diggle in his translation identifies The Man of Petty Ambition as the man with a mean desire for prestige.  Some of the details differ a tad today but he is instantly recognizable and still with us.  

The Man of Petty Ambition is the kind who, when he gets an invitation to dinner, is eager to sit next to the host. He takes his son to Delphi to have his hair cut. He goes to the trouble of acquiring an Aethiopian attendant. When he pays back a mina of silver he pays it back in new coin. He is apt to buy a little ladder for his domestic jackdaw and make a little bronze shield for it to carry when it hops onto the ladder. When he has sacrificed an ox he nails up the skull opposite the entrance to his house and fastens long ribbons around it, so that his visitors can see that he has sacrificed an ox. After parading with the cavalry he gives his slave the rest of his equipment to take home, then throws back his cloak and strolls through the marketplace in his spurs. On the death of his Maltese dog he builds a funeral monument and sets up a little slab with the inscription ‘ ∗ ∗ from Malta’. He dedicates a bronze finger in the sanctuary of Asclepius and does not let a day pass without polishing, garlanding, and oiling it. And you can be sure that he will arrange with the executive committee of the Council that he should be the one to make the public report on the conduct of religious business, and will step forward wearing a smart white cloak, with a crown on his head, and say ‘Men of Athens, my colleagues and I celebrated the Milk-Feast with sacrifices to the Mother of the Gods. The sacrifices were propitious. We beg you to accept your blessings.’ After making this report he goes home and tells his wife that he had an extremely successful day.

Words in the right hands are wonderful means for translating us across times and cultures.  

It makes one think of Wordsworth's poem.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

It seems that maybe it isn't that the world is too much with us so much as that we ourselves are always in the world and there are always enduring characters and characteristics of the human condition.  And authors inadvertently make that clear over time.