Gens EuropeaAuthor(s): Kirsti Simonsuuri and Herbert LomasSource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 10, Dublin/Europe/Dublin (Spring, 1991), pp. 77-80Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29735588 .

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Gens Europea

KIRSTISIMONSUURI

I have been a wanderer in Europe for as long as I can recall.

Europe is an awareness, and the gradual awakening of awareness is

personal growth. Petrarch, born in Arezzo in 1304, had no wish to be a

citizen of this or that Tuscan city-state: he was, he said, 'mundanus' -

a citizen of the world.1 The world, for him, was a known world: Italy, Greece, France, perhaps parts of Germany and England. He belonged to a plurality. This did not mean he was deprived of a homeland, for,

partly through his own activity, European culture was discovering its

Greek origins, which were gradually fusing with the Eastern inherit?

ance, as interpreted by Christianity, and creating a multitude of

syncretic, contradictory cultures.

Europe is first signalised as a geographical area - as against the

Peloponnesus - in the Homeric hymn to Apollo of probably the sixth

or seventh century BC. Seen from our perspective, at the end of the

twentieth century, European history consists of strata of awarenesses.

European citizenship is nowadays virtually world citizenship, since

we are so well acquainted with the world outside Europe. Neverthe?

less I feel at home in Europe; I breathe freely there, more freely

perhaps than ever in America. My field of research has been Europe;

and, like an anthropologist studying more distant cultures, I have

been imbued with my field. I am spiritually, physically and socially in

my own country when I take my way across the Rhine at Argentoratum -

Strasbourg as it is now called - or when I study Charles Estienne's

ancient handwriting in an early edition in Lupi Vadum. I take my way

through knowledge, and it takes its way through me.

The people I come across in my various wanderings, after I have

closed the books, are every bit as valuable to me as the citizens of my native country. How could they be less so, merely on the grounds of

their nationality? Everyone's stories are equally precious. The cultures

of Europe modulate from valley-slope to valley-slope, from one end of

the bridge to the other: each of its peoples speak its own exotic tongue and dialect, indigenous and untranslatable.

What I do as a profession in no way differentiates me from the

people I encounter, whether casual acquaintances or old friends.

A Turkish Gastarbeiter and I have this in common, that in Frankfurt

we are both in a foreign country. A Florentine architect and I have

plenty to talk about, for he has entertained Aalto and thereby devel

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78 IRISH REVIEW

oped an enthusiasm for exotic Finland. At the Friedrichstrasse station

I chat with an old lady Sunday-visiting with her West Berlin relations.

My face recalls her granddaughter's, whom she hasn't had a sight of

for years. In Paris, somewhere near the Place Contrescarpe, a wistful

melody is tenderly sung into my ear: it could be an invention of the

winds on the Lapland fellsides.

Rebellion drives a person away from their genotype and country of

origin, and drives a writer to extreme limits. Another motion is the

motion of return, rooting the exile again, giving a language; and the

tension between these antithetical movements underlies many a

modern work of art. All rebellion is ultimately rebellion against the

gods, as Camus says, for to take root is to surrender to the disposition of the gods. Neither of these movements, alone, has led particularly far in modern art of literature; but the conflict between the two has:

conflict that can suddenly mutate into a bridge. In comparison with all the other continents, America, Asia, Africa

and Australia, Europe is the corner of the earth where thought has

created reality and where man has always had faith in this possibility. The European heroes, Odysseus and Sisyphus

- the visitor to the

underworld and the captive of the underworld, the adventurer and

the drudge - are opposing poles of European Man, requiring each

other. Thought has created utopias and nightmares but also millennia

long structures. As with Marco Polo or Christopher Columbus, Europe has, by accident or design, discovered different countries, unexplored

regions. Asia, on the other hand, revolves in a vast orbit round the

wheel of fortune; even its most cultivated or spiritual consciousness is

an opium consciousness. As for America, it is in some sense unconscious - unconscious of its own existence otherwise than as a magical generator of material culture: a sort of twentieth-century Sampo to adapt the

magic mill in the Kalevala that grinds out wealth: corn, salt, gold and

magic, everything a person needs. The American dream is material

success. On the other hand, America is intermittently overconscious, like a damaged robot. America's intellectual life - its mighty universities

and research institutes, its formidable achievements in science and

education is based on meta traditions: traditions quarried from Europe's inherited monoliths.

Only now, a couple of hundred years after the foundation of the

United States of America, can we arrive at a clearer comprehension of

Europeanism as well -

possibly the most polymorphic, the most pro? found but also the most tragic of the cultures humanity has created.

Conceivably, the United States of Europe may never come into being,

despite all the aspirations towards integration and merger, for Europe's

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GENS EUROPEA 79

peoples are by nature too individualistic. Europe is the only culture

constructed on a basis of pessimistic consciousness. The European

gods cannot be propitiated with money or breathing techniques. The

totalitarian regimes thrown up by Europe - the Fascists, the Nazis, the

Stalinists - have collapsed before attaining their goal, total dominion.

But what is particularly European about them is their capacity to

emerge like some malign out-of-control mental experiment. After

destruction, reconstruction can begin; but destruction itself cannot

always be prevented: the best that may be hoped for is wise anticipa? tion, and the safeguarding of what can be safeguarded.

If, looking at Europe's past, we are able to read the signs, it may illuminate present significances in many ways. This is a continent that

must be read with lyrical intensity, in the style of a fervent lover: then

its multifarious landscapes and divided peoples open up and tell us

why the cities always grow up along the rivers, why a cathedral has

arisen on the site of a Roman basilica or pagan sanctuary, why wine

and fruits are the fountainhead of life, things even the poorest farmer

will want to nurture. All this secretes some cryptic sense.

It is difficult to demonstrate clearly what it is that makes one feel at

home somewhere. Marcel Proust recorded European man's psyche in

his three-thousand-page novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. In his

essay-collection, Contre Sainte-Beuve (1909), he writes about the re?

corders of consciousness: 'The poet's life contains its own little hap?

penings, as other people's lives do. He goes to the country. He travels.

But the name of the town where he spent his summer, inscribed at the

foot of the book's final page, along with a date, tells us that the life he

shares with others has for him a completely different significance; and

if, as sometimes happens, the town's name, testifying on the last page where and when the book was written, is also the name of the town

where the book's events are set, the whole novel appears as an enor?

mous extension into real life; and we realise that, for the poet, real life

was something utterly different from real life for other people.' For the Finn, it has perhaps, till now, been easier to identify with

Americanism and its myths. In Superman II (the only Superman film I

have seen, and that was in Oulu) the goodies speak American English, the baddies English English. The fact has significance, at least for the

average American. And the Finn, too, easily goes along with that: he

finds it more natural to side with unambiguous good and evil, rather

than ambiguous good and evil. Europe is a difficult continent. Its rules

of behaviour are complex, its cultures varied, its unarticulated signs

delicately nuanced. Everyone who departs from Finland has, in Flaubert's phrase, to endure the heart's apprenticeship-years:

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80 IRISH REVIEW

apprenticeship-years that, whatever the situation on departure, are

equally arduous, equally purgatorial. Finland is a region of the European imagination, like Dante's hell,

like Madame de Stael's North: a place you don't go to, but one that

plays a functional role in the European mythical universe. Finland is a

wilderness, an emptiness, a zero point, a point of reference the Euro?

pean can populate with the symbols that seem appropriate at any

given time. If a periphery did not exist, it would have to be invented.

The limits of the known world are always being newly located.

And yet Finland belongs to Europe, to nowhere else. Finland's

corner of the earth is certainly 'the edge of Europe'. But the Finns too

are permitted to exercise imagination. Each person's outlook and

thought decide how much of the heartland, of the core, he can absorb

and make his own, even while lingering on the fringes. And at this

moment the best interpreters of Europeanism are precisely those on

the fringes in one way or another - writers on the sidelines of their

own country, or in exile: Singer, Canetti, Milosz, Sperber, Cioran; and, from an earlier generation, Joyce, Broch, Kafka, Mann.

The European still writes about his return from the Trojan war and

makes a hopelessly protracted journey into the heart of his mind, into

his very self. Could it be that, ahead, there is something quite new,

that the limits of the known world will retreat still further?

Translated by Herbert Lomas.

NOTES

1 Rerum familiarum libri 9,13.10

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