What did I ever truly know of the United States?

Today, nearly twelve years of travels and moments lived in the US overlap in my mind. A myriad of memories, whose images return suddenly, whenever the country is mentioned again. Some of these visions still haunt me at times : the red of sunset resting on the peaks of Manhattan, the small roads lined with groves leading towards Boston, whose misty harbor sometimes looked like an old thriller, the rocky cliffs of the Pacific coast, which could not help but remind me of certain landscapes along Europe’s Atlantic shore.

And yet, despite this accumulation, it seems to me that I crossed the US without ever truly entering it. Perhaps my mistake was to believe I already knew it. After having seen so many images, absorbed so many stories, and because, from Europe, it appeared to resemble us so closely. And did we not always expect this giant, so close and so distant at the same time, to echo our own ideas, to reflect back to us a prestige that had once been ours? Again and again, we fell into the trap of this illusion, which slipped away as the landscape opened before us.

And so, for me at least, the US remain a mystery as vast as other immensities (like India or Central Asia, for example), that I have crossed through slowness and endurance. Yet this immensity resembles no other. Here, space feels more abstract, eluding the mind, as though it had been laid down only recently, without the visible thickness of time.

Along those majestic avenues where the wind surged violently between the skyscrapers, over which the light was endlessly recomposed, never had solitude seemed so great to me, and never, paradoxically, had life felt so intense. But amid such tumult, were inner lives ever truly shared? And for hours on end, along roads that stretched and multiplied, the journey revealed not a succession of places bearing eternity, but a silent continuity, broken only by the sudden appearance of cities. Their outlines would emerge against the dusty horizon, before vanishing again, replaced by vast agricultural plains or arid landscapes.

Arriving from Europe, from its constellation of closely knit countries, its cities of narrow, cobbled streets, its measured landscapes, it took time for the eye to grow accustomed to the vastness of America. To new distances. To new ambitions as well. Where the European spirit seemed to me to now seek measure and restraint, America continued to let its wildess dreams rise to the surface.

I cannot easily say what binds me to this country, whose familiarity reassures me even as its mystery frightens me. To this language I believe I speak fluently, yet whose nuances I still miss. To this sense of greatness that drew me in, even as I could not fully accept the principles by which it was guided.

In time, I came to understand that it was too diverse and too complex to be easily understood, despite the history we shared. And that the prodigious and contradictory energy that gave birth to so much genius also drove it, relentlessly, towards violence and division.

At heart, I believe I regret that it appeared to me too early, and too often. That it was shown to me before I was able to truly to see it. Sold to me, when I should have discovered it with a brand new eye. Perhaps then I would have learned to know it truly, and to welcome it for what it was, without either idealizing it or rejecting it for what it was not.