Continuing this rumination of illusory mobility (Moving On, February 22), I’ve been thinking about the way experience shapes our (stationary) selves. When I lived in Europe, I met a few expatriate Americans, who always interested me. What was it about Germany, about Italy, that made them “at home” there? I took it for granted that some very negative experience of some kind had made them uproot themselves from the entire United States (not just their hometowns), and adopt a foreign country, a foreign culture and people, as their own, but I was usually wrong in this assumption.
It was a topic I approached as delicately as I could. I was curious, but I didn’t want to be offensively “nosey.” I needn’t have feared. None of them had any difficulty answering questions: Why would you leave the United States for good—permanently? (Often, they’d never returned, or they hadn’t returned for many years.) They didn’t usually change their citizenship, though some did; it was just that “citizenship” had no personal significance for them; it was not an identity they either claimed or disclaimed.
Where did you come from? It was always the North somewhere, or the Midwest—oddly, never the West or the South.
Why did you decide to move here (Florence, Heidelberg, Lucerne) permanently? You’ve never wanted to go back at all? I don’t know. I like it here. I just don’t want to go back.
So—how long have you been here now, without returning? Eight years, seventeen, whatever. My mom passed away last year—I went back for the funeral.
And so it went.
Much of this part of our zeitgeist that sees living as “moving on” from one life experience to the next, ad infinitum, is simply refuted by those who actually do move—like expatriates. Or, perhaps, like me. I was born an hour away from where I live now, but from earliest childhood, I moved—and moved—and moved. I changed schools seventeen times in twelve years. I won’t go into a life story here, but when someone asks me, “Was your father military?” My answer is, “No, my mother was romantic.”
Wherever I went, I was always “the new girl.” I learned some things (though not much in school, with all that moving). For example, at one school, the response to me might be welcoming; at another, I’d be the instant outcast. Very early, without knowing it, I learned that whoever I am, it has nothing to do with what others think of me. I also learned that whatever a problem may be, its solution is not geographic. These are important lessons, usually reserved for adult learning, but I knew them at ten. And I learned detachment, a mixed blessing, as those who have it know well.
We don’t move on. We stay “where” we are and respond to the experiences that come to us, and it’s our responses (or reactions) to these experiences that form us. We do not leave (“move on”) from our experiences; they leave us. They leave us even if we don’t want them to. And they leave us changed, whether we like it or not, forever. We can’t undo them by moving on from them.
The expatriates I met in Europe did not hate America, nor did they love it. Their attitude toward America was largely indifferent. They simply didn’t “live” there; that is, there was no living of their lives there. They “lived” in Brussels, or Geneva, or Madrid, and they chose to stay where they lived.
Life is not a journey without a destination. It’s a destination, a place without the option of leaving it (except via death). I think this notion of leaving, of constant moving, is a way of denying the irrevocability of what is done to us and of what we do (sin). It makes us believe that we need only forgive or apologize and all is “undone,” and we can move on as if nothing had happened. What is the half-life of that styrofoam cup you dropped in the forest? A thousand years. But what is the half-life of that adultery you committed against your marriage? Or that abandonment of your child? Eternity.
Why is that hard to accept? Because it means our power is not so great as we’d like to believe, that we are not each other’s answer to a question or a problem, that our only true security is God. But most of all, if we look at the root of all such human attempts to alter the unalterable reality where we have—all of us—always lived, we find it’s the same old cause: the pursuit of immortality, the fear of death, that drives such attempts to remake that reality, to get a new address—to run.
I’ve not known that many people who’ve chosen to live in Europe, but the few I do know are atheists (too strong a term actually…perhaps pagan is more applicable) who live for pleasure and stimulation of the senses. They like the rich cultural heritage of Europe, the food, the coffee, the wine etc. and are cultural parasites feeding off the carcass that was once Christendom. They don’t bring new dishes to the table but like chowing down gourmet food of someone else’s making…ghosts, living twighlight lives. I agree that they’re from the Midwest…why do you think this would be?
Why do they come from the Midwest? Perhaps because they are culture vultures, and whether it’s actually true or not, the Midwest is perceived as a cultural wasteland.
But I hadn’t thought about the atheism/paganism. I think, for a great many people, art is a religion. It’s not any more or less worthy of worship than socio-political progressive humanism, or science, or the emotional hedonism so dominant in pop culture these days.
It’s odd that the midwest is perceived that way, isn’t it? Here in Ohio we have a college or university every 25 miles…the Cleveland Orchestra! plus 100 piece orchestras in just about every small town…I live about 1/2 hr. from Oberlin for pete’s sake. ha But I agree wholeheartedly about worshipping art…I have friends whose frequent trips to the Cleve. Museum of Art almost rival mine to Mass and they almost whisper as we glide from sterile room to sterile room….I feel like I’m in a morgue, so out of respect to the dead, I share their stillness. Seeing the lifeless displays makes me want to say “My, doesn’t it look almost real?” When I lived in the northwest I found that outside the major cities there’s a healthy culture rather like that found in the rural south that doesn’t have this pompous and fawning need for “Art’ with a capital a. Now that I think about it, perhaps there’s TOO much ‘cul cha’ here in the midwest and it’s become a joke? Culture mulchers?
Culture mulchers? That’s probably the same thing as culture vultures.
I think you’re right: they do tend to dwell in large cities, probably where there are lots of cultural venues or happenings, things they can feed on, certainly, but also things already declared Art (so that they don’t have to wonder whether something actually is Art. Authenticity of response is not common for these people–they have to be told by experts–their priests?)
Sometimes, I think they genuflect on entering certain galleries, but that may be only when there’s a special show. The reverence, the hushed tones, could inspire some of those annoying chatterers at my church before Mass (who also have a problem with authenticity … )