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and individual past. It is, indeed, this past which has thrust upon us
our present, so troubling role. It is the past lived on the American
continent, as against that other past, irrecoverable now on the shores
of Europe, which must sustain us in the present. The truth about that
past is not that it
is
too brief, or too superficial, but only that we, having
turned our faces so resolutely away from it, have never demanded
from it what it has to give. It is this demand which the American
student in Paris is forced, at length, to make, for he has otherwise no
identity, no reason for being here, nothing to sustain him here. From
the vantage point of Europe he discovers his own country. And this is
a discovery which not only brings to an end the alienation of the Amer–
ican from himself, but which also makes clear to him, for the first time,
the extent of
his
involvement in the life of Europe.
James Baldwin
