During my first trip to Paris, I found myself intimidated by everyone’s sense of composure. I was amazed at how people—who didn’t otherwise seem crazy—talked to themselves. Someone explained the European psyche; they have a developed capacity to “converse” with themselves. Now, I wonder if that confidence, that ability to reckon with one’s own soul, is something Americans lack. We compulsively look to media, to society, to our partners for our own self-esteem, without ever stopping to wonder how our self-worth ended up in someone else’s hands.
We in the New World are rookies of sorts. Human beings elsewhere seem more aware and less terrified of the fact that a person is born alone and dies alone—as though people become accustomed to that notion after many hundreds of years of civilization. We Americans are like a senior class about to graduate into the real world, socially green enough to think we’ll all be friends forever and that nothing will change.1
This section (like much of the content of the article) is the product of naïvete taken to the point of madness about the differences between Europe and America. Humans are not so different from one another between any two countries; insofar as such differences exist, they exist within cultures (in my mind largely for genetic reasons) rather that between cultures.
No one who had lived in Europe for even a short time would make these sorts of points. It would probably suffice simply to have read recent works of European fiction or a French newspaper to see the absurdity of thinking our sense of the world (exemplified, as in the rest of the article, in our sexual mores) can be so different from place to place.
Or, if our sexual mores are so different, perhaps my Spanish friends are right to say about Americans: “sois todas zorras.”