Friday, June 10, 2005
Remembering Europe
I’ve just returned from a trip to France, Spain, and Portugal, and I want to share with you the one idea that haunted me throughout my stay. I was constantly thinking about time, and about our relationship to history and to the future—our own future, and also a future that survives us. Often I have only the vaguest notions about my place and purpose in this great flow of years. European culture is saturated with that sense of history, but even as I admire it, it fills me with anxiety.
My experience wasn’t unusual. Americans are invariably impressed by the historic character of European cities. In some Iberian towns, my wife and I stayed in buildings that were erected over three hundred years ago, sometimes situated across from eight hundred-year-old churches. In the cloisters of one such church, we watched archaeologists excavating Roman ruins and, further down, the remains of a Paleolithic settlement. But we also found this same sense of depth on a smaller scale when a wine merchant in Lisbon explained to us the differences among port wines. Some types, he explained, are allowed to age for forty years or more. Serious port drinkers buy bottles or even casks with the intention of keeping them for many, many years, even beyond their own lifetime.
Those European cathedrals are among the best examples of a relationship to time that is foreign to us. The cathedral embodies a long cultural history, a sense of rootedness and permanence we rarely feel in the U.S. Because it required centuries to construct, the original builders understood that they would never live so long as to see the project completed. In order to proceed at all, they needed to have a certain amount of faith in the future of their city and in the suprapersonal value of their work.
That kind of faith is hard for me, hard for us, I think. Europe fascinates and pleases us because we live in a transient, throw-away culture. Even our homes are temporary. Soon we’ll buy a larger one, or our employment will force us to relocate. These factors discourage us, for example, from transforming our backyard into our ideal garden or planting a shade tree that won’t reach maturity for another fifty years. Not only are we reluctant to build for a future that isn’t our own, but also we understand that the subsequent owners, acting on a different set of desires, may eradicate all our work. We buy throw-away furniture that we can, without remorse, sell for a few dollars at a yard sale if we need to lighten our load. Even if we cherish lovely things, what’s the point of owning an expensive, hand-made dining room table, and dragging it around the country for years, when our heirs are likely to auction it off or abandon it as soon as we’re gone?
And so, as often as not, we never try, not really. We never make the effort to transform our world into a garden, our home into a palace, to write the great book, or to build something great and permanent together. And in every way, my generation is in danger of abandoning the cultivation of beauty. Of course, this tendency toward abandonment has been one of the graces of American culture. We are constantly freeing ourselves from the past, making our world anew, reinventing our desires. We aren’t bound, in the way Europeans are, to the endless responsibility of maintaining the artifacts of an overshadowing greatness. We have so little guilt, but also so little commitment. Our enjoyments are as transient as our employment. We live as though we wished that nothing would survive our own passing fantasies, as though we owed the earth and history, which have given us so many gifts, nothing—and I don’t mean nothing to remember us by, but nothing that shows what we remember.