Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

“I say: I’ll go back to the hotel and change my clothes.”“Home! Home! How can you Americans keep calling a hotel home?”Because a home is not an edifice, but an interior and transportableadjustment. In Chicago—in the good old days—my friends used to changetheir apartment on the first of May. They were not discontented with theold one; they simply liked to impress their homemaking faculty on somenew rooms.More and more farmers of the Midwest are ending their days insouthern California and Florida. After fifty years of hard work in Iowa, theydo not find it strange to live, to die, and to be buried among palms.This unrelatedness to place goes so deep that, in an Old-World sense,America can have no shrines. For us it is not where genius lived that is important.If Mount Vernon and Monticello were not so beautiful in themselvesand relatively accessible, would so many of us visit them? What difficultiesprivate individuals have had, in rich America, to save the Whitman and Poehouses.Americans are abstract. They are disconnected. They have a relation,but it is to everywhere, to everybody, and to always. That is not new, butit is very un-European. It is difficult, but it is exhilarating. It shatters manylives; it inspirits others.There are those countries of Europe each shut in on itself by bordersimmemorially defended, each shut in with its own loved hills, streams,towns, and roads, each with the monuments of its past continually renewingthe memory of its history, each with its language—not a self-evident thing,as natural as breathing, but a thing rendered assertive and objective becausebeyond the borders were all those others speaking no less assertively a deplorablegibberish. Shut in with the absorbing repetitions of customs andlong-molded manners; shut in with its convulsions which themselves hadthe character of repetitions. Shut in, above all, with the memories of oldoppressions and with the memories of the long, bloody revolts against oldoppressions, against authorities and powers—once awe-inspiring, but nowhollow as the bugaboos of infancy—still vestigially present, however, asdisavowed menaces and seductions, invitations to escape from the burdensof freedom (Führer! Duce! Kommissar!).How close together they live, in each nation, how shoulder to shoulder—notonly by reason of the density of population, but because of a sortof psychic consanguinity, another aftermath of feudalism. The relation ofmaster and serf is a “hot” relation; it is a bond of either love or hate, as isany relationship which involves command over another’s freedom. It is no192