So I'm back in the states. I guess... I shouldn't be updating on this blog anymore because it's a travel diary but... I think its time to break kosher.
Being in D.C. again is so strange. I feel like I'm in an alternate reality where I know the street names and the metro lines but something is terribly twisted. A twilight reality where everything is shades of grey, ashen, and empty. That's one thing Abroad has taught me, America is a oh-so quiet place. In my brief stint in the Texas suburbs, the houses loomed like impossibly silent brick gravestones. And the only sight of life was glimpses of Christian-radio listening, inward looking housewives padded, heated artifical autos and oversized suburbans.... I thought maybe it was just the suburbs, but when I came to D.C. the reality was unbroken. Instead of autos, denizens of D.C. had their ipods, iphones, and icy coolness towards strangers. Crowds brush up against each other on metros, street corners, while barely making an eye. The buildings were ashen modern things looming like mausoleums against empty vast parks broken by recreations of a greco-roman ancestory in the Old World.
I guess all this feeling I get about American culture cumulated in a visit to the Hopper exhibit at the national gallery. I think he felt it too. That lonely individual nature we Americans have. Even back then in the 20s... he was spying on people through urban windows, painting the silence in the cities and suburbs... In the end, America is fiercly individual, beautifully and tragically so. We are an introverted nation, idealistically believing we can do it alone.
3 comments:
That's very interesting you feel this way. It's an almost unhealthy isolation culture we have here. Yet sometimes I find rest and rejuvenation in solitude. I also think that big (particularly Northern) cities have much more of a cold culture than small towns or Southern cities. We are a strange culture here in the U.S.
True enough. I think that solitude is destruction and creation rolled into one.... It can be dreadfully lonely but also really liberating. I do have to say small towns are better when it comes to the social thing but they come equipped with their own problems too...
Loved this piece, your descriptions were quite apt. I expect to have a very similar experience coming back to Seattle. I'd be interested to hear how your thinking has evolved over the past few months. How have you adjusted? Have you lost anything in the adjustment, gained anything?
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