On the Fourth of July, I arrived in Chicago with no definite plans to go back to Austria. After two years there, the prospect of never returning sometimes makes me want to lock myself inside an Alpine hut with nothing but a lifetime supply of vinegar-based potato salad, Zweigelt red wine, and Austrian dialect. But after less than two weeks in the United States, I’ve learned that some time away from home can cast the normal or mundane in a strange, new, and unfamiliar light.

Garden-fresh tomatoes on a hamburger, evening church services, two wide-open, arrow-straight lanes on a drive to Michigan. I knew these things as routine, commonplace. In many ways they still are, and I’m thankful for that. But now I can experience them again, not for the first time but the first time in a long time.

It’s a strange, rewarding experience to be surprised in your own home. There are small things: stores that never close, kindness from absolute strangers, the harsh omnipotence of air conditioning, incredibly friendly, sometimes overbearing customer service. It’s easy to adjust to these things. You remember these things as status quo and know to expect them. But then your waitress is grinning from ear to ear asking if you’d like your bill and you haven’t even finished your meal and you think “This really is an entirely different place.”

Since coming back I’ve been reading The Dyer’s Hand, a collection of essays by Anglo-American poet W.H. Auden, who also lived in Austria. Interspersed throughout his essays are reflections on the U.S.A, its patterns, people, and peccadilloes. I have read many of the passages before, but, like a twilight drive on I-96, they have recently taken on a new enchantment for me.

In an essay titled “American Poetry,” Auden captures the expansive American landscape and the yet more extensive American project of equality, writing:

It is an unforgettable experience for anyone born on the other side of the Atlantic to take a plane journey by night across the United States. Looking down he will see the lights of some town like a last outpost in a darkness stretching for hours ahead, and realize that, even if there is no longer an actual frontier, this is still a continent only partially settled and developed, where human activity seems a tiny thing in comparison to the magnitude of the earth and the equality of men not some dogma of politics or jurisprudence but a self-evident fact. He will behold a wild nature, compared with which the landscapes of Salvator Rosa are as cosy as Arcadia and cannot possibly be thought of in human or personal terms.

Reviewing Henry James “The American Scene,” an essay capturing James’ experiences in America, Auden writes of the “’hereditary thinness’ of the American Margin,” citing “the horrible Rockettes and the insane salads,” “radio commercials,” and “Hollywood Christianity.” These things, he says, help the newcomer “understand by contrast the nature of the Good Place”, alluding to ‘The Great Good Place,” the title of a James short story. Thin and shallow as they may be, perhaps it is only through these things, Auden suggests, that one can one “desire [the Good Place] with sufficient desperation to stand a chance of arriving.”

Prefacing that essay, Auden excerpts a portion of a poem by Marianne Moore. The poem is titled “England” and it captures the surprise I’ve felt since returning home. The excerpted portion follows:

   America where there

is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars

are smoked on the

   street in the north; where there are no proof readers, no

silkworms, no digressions;

 

the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less

country—in which letters are written

   not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand,

but in plain American which cats and dogs can read!

Andrew Knot

Andrew Knot (’11) lives and writes in Cologne, Germany.