Reflections on Returning from Italy
WILLIAM BARRETT
T
~E
ARMY's
Air Transport Command has made possible one of the
most powerful experiences in comparative civilizations. You step into
the C-54 at Naples, become semi-anaesthetized for a day and a half try–
ing to forget the monotony of the upper air and the cramped plane
quarters, are disgorged tiredly into an airport taxi and wake up at a
midtown hotel inside the teeming cornucopia, New York. The absence
of a long intervening voyage, during which all the nameless differences
of immediacy have a chance to wear off, now makes it literally possible
to go to sleep in one civilization and wake up in another.
Here suddenly are the different-looking people. With all the details
of difference you can't put your finger
OR
but which made it possible
to spot an American in Europe even when not in uniform; and which,
all around you now
en masse,
no longer leave any doubt that one is
perceiving here a new type, the
American type,
into which the species is
passing. And the first American women you see! how differently they
walk, more stiffly (are they all wearing girdles?), aggressively, the
mastresses (neither mistresses nor masters, the coinage is necessary) in
a feminist society, but looking less satisfied by it. This city with its intact
skyline has never been united into compact terror (a European form of
existence) at the sound of real bombers with real bombs coming and
going. A city without ruins now looks unreal, as if it had remained
in a quiet backwater away from what had been happening in the world
during these last years-become provincial, a little as a midwestern
city used to strike us in
comp~rison
with New York. These faces and
voices aren't haunted, have never cowered at even a possible bombing.
Does one really see this as given, as there, or am I projecting? Or the
hyperaesthesia of return? I don't know, but I've checked with other
people; and the impression
was
overwhelming. Perhaps because the
particular part of the New World I woke up in (by the grace of God
and tl1e accident of the hotel congestion) was midtown Fifth Avenue,
in the middle of the women's shopping district: the antithesis of Europe,
the horn of plenty, the immense department stores bursting with
good~
(the "shortages" I heard about later, but how laughably piddling they
seemed after Europe), the swarms of suburbanwife shoppers absorbed
