Today I received the L.L.Bean Clothing For Women Fall 2007 catalog, featuring 50 new fall styles plus hundreds more online, 20 free coupon dollars and an assurance of fast, reliable delivery.

Some people welcome a thick “Design Within Reach” brochure, opening it to imagine private dreams of living a life that does not include dog hair or Legos. Some people curl up on a Saturday with the bright aquas and greens and slightly confused ad copy of IKEA (“...designer Ehlen Johansson is passionate about taking mind-blowing challenges by the horns...”). And I know at least one outwardly downtown Joan Jett type who soothes her edgy soul by looking at the fluffy towels in the JCPenney’s Home Sale catalog. But if I am on a deadline, and therefore wracked with fear and procrastination, nothing looks better to me than a nice, thick L.L.Bean Fall Clothing for Women rolled up in the old mailbox.

Is it those out-of-focus picket fences in the softly treed background, those flaming leaves scattered on the painted porch floor? Is it the warm wool throw someone’s forgotten on the back of the wicker chair? Or maybe it’s the colors—the plums and russets and coppers—speaking as they do to my limbic brain, drowzing it with thoughts of grapes and apples and the peace that comes with the knowledge of a nice, uninterrupted food supply lying in the back of the cave. Could it be the rounded typefaces, soft as melted s’mores, that create my mind’s comfort in it all—create a comfort that beckons me to plunge right into the pages, as into a vat of warm apple butter?

I come from a family of storytellers. Southerners on one side and Russians on the other, the sensibilities that created Thomas Wolfe and Fyodor Dostoevsky slugged it out every Saturday at the breakfast table. Taken together, those stories created the myth that was “Ilyin.” Not a big myth, but one that unified us, one that gave my tribe identity.

Even after we got a television in the late sixties, the stories of my family were still told and retold. Those stories of personal heroism, of valor, of defeat or victory all got repeated at the breakfast table. We still heard from the Southerners about Aunt Bessie hitting her bunion with a croquet mallet, and we still heard from the Russians about the four-year-old Grandmaman Blanche pulling the coattails of the stiffly white-uniformed Nicholas I. What of people who lived today? We didn’t hear new stories, nor did we make any. Instead, we watched Bonanza.

The family myth began to age—the stories weren’t putting on any new growth: Old ones weren’t being put away. People contributed small snippets, quick sketches, one-liners, but no beginnings, middles and ends—no fully-rounded stories that helped the continuing family meet the challenges of the present moment. We learned a lot about how to behave if about to be shot at a post, and how to survive a major economic Depression. But we did not learn how people could negotiate our post-everything world. We did not come away with a mythic toolbox quite right for the job at hand.

But back to L.L.Bean. After finding the catalog, I decided to lie down quietly and to think about the great North Woods, about how I could be in them rather than about how I should be writing. The same cozy fleece was there, and the same corduroy jeans and the same flannel shirts that I have seen all my life, but something just didn’t ring true. It was the moose that started me thinking.

I was looking at an embroidered tote, reading about the iconic Maine motifs sported by this sturdy nature-inspired tote. You could get a moose tote, a lobster tote, a loon or a dog. Maine in a nutshell. From a strictly formal point of view, the lobster, the loon and the dog all looked pretty good. Paws where they were supposed to be, the right length of bill or tail feather. But the moose. That moose had been embroidered by someone who had never seen a moose.

Moose look pretty weird up close, a real rag-tag bundle of parts, and you could see how a person at an embroidery machine, say in Beijing, might say to herself, “This image can’t be right. I’ll just make those antlers a bit rounder and those forelegs a bit less knobby.” And, after being embroidered on his bag, there he was, looking at me with that “I-don’t-know-who-I-am” look on his muzzle. “I am a moose shorn of identity,” he seemed to be saying, “for I no longer really look like a true moose. I myself have never seen a moose, and yet I am supposed to be a moose.” That moose had such a Kafka thing going on that I had to close the catalog and go back to writing.

Well, this is all a metaphor really. As designers, we create ideal mental worlds, inhabitable worlds of imagination, and we make them seem real to everyday people. That’s the great power of design: That’s what attracts us to it, that’s the ideological use of it, no matter what our personal political or apolitical bent. If we are not actively involved in laying the cozy woolen throw upon the wicker chair, we are passively involved. We design the identifiers of the product that lies upon the chair, we design the chair. We are part of the great storytelling machine of our culture. We are not nihilists. We are believers. We push Heaven.