by Bruce Bawer
While Andrew is visiting his homeland for the first time in a long time, I’m back in the U.S., seeking out professional opportunities and contemplating moving back here after 13 years in Europe. The feeling of being back in America, possibly for good, is surprisingly strange, powerful, and complex. When I moved to Europe, Europe was exotic, and living there was an adventure. Over the years it became familiar. Yet even when it was no longer alien, it remained an adventure. I was still very much the American abroad. (You can become fluent in a language, but it will never be your mother tongue.) The foreignness of my environment never ceased to add an element of color and magic that lifted up everyday life – that made it more interesting – in ways I became accustomed to and, I’m afraid, eventually took for granted. For all the cultural and political criticisms I’ve made of Europe over the years, Europe always remained for me, on the strictly personal level, a place of poetry. (Paradoxically, this was true even though I was living in Norway, amid the most determinedly prosaic of peoples.)
What does it mean, then, to come back to America, to my own country, after so many years? In Norway, I was, first and foremost, the American – not the writer, not the gay guy, but the American, a latter-day version of some Henry James protagonist on the loose in the Old World. I counted myself very fortunate to be an American and was, in my very American way, invariably blunt in responding to glib, inane attacks on the U.S. by people who considered their country immeasurably superior in smarts and in virtue to my own.
Yet once back in my beloved homeland, I found myself struggling to feel at home again. My first couple of days back, walking around Manhattan, once the center of my world, I was thoroughly at sea: everything around me was at once both familiar and strange – without, at the same time, being even the slightest bit exotic. Visiting old haunts and interacting with strangers, I felt uncomfortably inauthentic, as if I were doing an imitation of my old self, a person I no longer was; I couldn’t help feeling that I’d left the larger part of myself behind, on the other side of the Atlantic. I found myself mulling over clichés: time changes everything; you can’t go home again; you never step into the same river twice. A line from Robert Frost kept running through my head: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” I’d known that line almost my whole life, but only now really understood it: you inhabit the land before it truly inhabits you.
I suppose the bottom line is, simply enough, that such heavily freighted psychological and emotional transitions can’t be negotiated overnight. Even in this globalized world, the differences between national cultures remain rich, subtle, profound. (This is even true of the U.S. and Norway, which, according to studies, is, culturally speaking, the most Americanized country in Europe.)
All that being said, the transition, at least if you’re trying to find your place back on the American scene, is aided if you try to pull it off at the beginning of July. Doing a morning shopping run on Saturday in Scarsdale, N.Y., where I was staying with friends, I was caught up short by not one but several strangers who said to me on the street as I passed: “Happy Fourth of July!” You need to know that Norwegians, as a rule, are highly aloof folks who are not in the habit of extending spontaneous greetings to strangers. That’s one of the things I got used to over the years; and although I have never forgotten that Americans are, by contrast, perhaps the world's friendliest people, this sudden unexpected expression of it, at a time when I had just come home from far away, somehow caught me unawares and affected me deeply. Heading back with my purchases to my friends’ apartment, I found myself choking up – and being profoundly aware that, whatever changes time and distance had wrought in me, I was still, after all, an American, through and through.
Happy (belated) Independence Day (apropos of which, read this), and thanks, Andrew, for inviting me to hang out here for a while.
The Dish 