Home
Home is not where you live but where they understand you. -Christion Morgenstern, writer (1871-1914)
Europe, in my case. When I was a college student in Texas a priest showed me a large painting of a young family fleeing Mexico. They appeared huddled together in the lower right corner of the canvas, pursued by a fantastic swirling gyre of south-of-the-border things – an eagle with a serpent in its beak, toothy grinning skulls, a faceless woman’s naked torso – chasing them across the Rio Grande into El Norte.
Though born and raised in the US, I have always felt a bit like that family in relation to my own homeland.
During my studies in Texas I also had the good fortune of spending a semester abroad in Europe and discovered that, like Henry Miller, I owned an old world soul. I craved density of place and urban beauty, and perhaps above all else, a sense of proportion towards life. I could not continue to live in a place where, day in and day out, people ate savorless food in front of computer monitors during their lunch breaks, by choice.
A natural doubter in a land of believers, my only path was escape.
Filed under: europe | 3 Comments
So did you escape? Will you escape? I understand exactly what you say – but then I was born in the old world with an old world soul. I love America – but there is more to the world than that. Best of luck.
Ivan: That’s the question. Physically, yes, I’ve lived and worked in the EU for over half a decade. In mind and spirit? Well, as you can probably deduce from my other posts, America weighs heavy on my mind.
And curiously enough, on the minds of many Europeans I encounter. For them, America is a bit like that old chum you used to hang out with but with whom you really don’t have much in common anymore.
Yet there is a curiousity about how things managed to get so grave so quickly. And a barely concealed resentment about the global influence that the US wields, of late, so maladroitly. As Putin recently observed, America a hungry wolf that “eats and listens to no one”. (It takes one to know one, I guess.)