A young American said to me: “I am not very keen on Europe, but should like to see it, and have done with it.” He is an ass. How can one “see” Europe and have done with it? One might as well say: I want to see the moon next week and have done with it. If one doesn’t want to see the moon, he doesn’t look. And if he doesn’t want to see Europe, he doesn’t look either. But neither of ’em will go away because he’s not looking.
There’s no “having done with it.” Europe is here, and will be here, long after he has added a bit of dust to America. To me, I simply don’t see the point of that American trick of saying one is “through with a thing,” when the thing is a good deal better than oneself.
I can hear that young man saying: “Oh, I’m through with the moon, she’s played out. She’s a dead old planet anyhow, and was never more than a side issue.” So was Eve only a side issue. But when a man is through with her, he’s through with most of his life.
It’s the same with Europe. One may be sick of certain aspects of European civilization. But they’re in ourselves, rather than in Europe. As a matter of fact, coming back to Europe, I realize how much more tense the European civilization is, in the Americans, than in the Europeans. The Europeans still have a vague idea that the universe is greater than they are, and isn’t going to change very radically, not for all the telling of all men put together. But the Americans are tense, somewhere inside themselves, as if they felt that once they slackened, the world would really collapse. It wouldn’t. If the American tension snapped tomorrow, only that bit of the world which is tense and American would come to an end. Nothing more.
How could I say: I am through with America? America is a great continent; it won’t suddenly cease to be. Some part of me will always be conscious of America. But probably some part greater still in me will always be conscious of Europe, since I am a European.
As for Europe’s being old, I find it much younger than America. Even these countries of the Mediterranean, which have known quite a bit of history, seem to me much, much younger even than Taos, not to mention Long Island, or Coney Island.
In the people here there is still, at the bottom, the old, young insouciance. It isn’t that the young don’t care: it is merely that, at the bottom of them there isn’t care. Instead there is a sort of bubbling-in of life. It isn’t till we grow old that we grip the very sources of our life with care, and strangle them.
And that seems to me the rough distinction between an American and a European. They are both of the same civilization, and all that. But the American grips himself, at the very sources of his consciousness, in a grip of care: and then, to so much of the rest of life, is indifferent. Whereas, the European hasn’t got so much care in him, so he cares much more for life and living.
That phrase again of wanting to see Europe and have done with it shows that strangle hold so many Americans have got on themselves. Why don’t they say: I’d like to see Europe, and then, if it means something to me, good! and if it doesn’t mean much to me, so much the worse for both of us. Vogue la galere!
I’ve been a fool myself, saying: Europe is finished for me. It wasn’t Europe at all, it was myself, keeping a strangle-hold on myself. Anil that strangle-hold I carried over to America; as many a man — and woman, worse still — has done before me.
Now, back in Europe, I feel a real relief. The past is too big, and too intimate, for one generation of men to get a strangle hold on it. Europe is squeezing the life out of herself, with her mental education and fixed ideas. But she hasn’t got her hands round her own throat not half so far as America has hers; here the grip is already falling slack; and if the system collapses, it’ll only be another system collapsed, of which there have been plenty. But in America, where men grip themselves so much more intensely and suicidally — the women worse — the system has its hold on the very sources of consciousness, so God knows what would happen, if the system broke.
No, it’s a relief to be by the Mediterranean, and gradually let the tight coils inside oneself come slack. There is much more life in a deep insouciance, which really is the clue to faith, than in this frenzied, keyed-up care, which is characteristic of our civilization, but which is at its worst, or at least its intensest, in America.