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highlighted the Enlightment platitude of the critical spirit that rejects
faith, religion, and superstition but ends by lamenting "the loss of its
spiritual world." Modern universalism denies cultural differences in the
name of the impoverished universal of entertainment and consumption.
That is why it fails to reconcile men . The friendship it postulates is as
tepid as it is superficial. Bringing McDonalds to Moscow or Teheran will
never make ardent democrats of the Russians or the Iranians. Diversions
alone will never eliminate Babel. There is always a dark side to Mickey
Mouse's smile. [. . .]
True cosmopolitanism, in contrast to the stew of Babel, is rooted in
the depths of several layers of memory, in numerous particularities. It
does not indulge in flying over all the world's summits, its seas, and its
elevations.
It
does not collect traits here and there. It becomes incarnate.
Liberating oneself from one's roots, separating oneself from all one is near
to join the foreign, does not mean floating freely like an atom, but means
claiming additional possessions. It means counterbalancing the land of
one's birth with additional homelands. That is why cosmopolitanism in–
volves suffering.
It
is a trial that superior beings choose, finding joy and
strength in overcoming habitual limits that seem absolutes common to all
mortals. Consider Elias Canetti, a Sephardic Jew born in Bulgaria into a
family which addressed its children in Spanish, who learned German, his
parents' language, under his mother's harsh discipline. In teaching him,
she found no hurdle too high and no humiliation too great, to her young
son's initial despair and subsequent enchantment. "There was no question
of abandoning other languages at the time. My mother believed that cul–
ture was the literatures of all the languages she knew. But German
became the language of our love - and how exclusive it was!" Consider
Nabokov and his account of the pain he experienced after 1940 when he
adopted English as the language of his writing. "By changing my lan–
guage, I did not renounce the language of Avvakum, Pushkin, and
Tolstoy ... in other words, I did not abandon a common language, but a
vital and individual idiom. I had long been used to expressing myself as I
wished and was not satisfied with the cliches of my adopted tongue. Thus
the monstrous difficulties of this reincarnation and the horror of having to
part with a living, docile being, initially plunged me into a state I need
not describe. I will simply state that no writer of any stature experienced
it before I did." As a more recent example, the Hungarian writer, Agota
Kristof, living in Switzerland and writing in French, constantly mentions
the very great difficulty she has in using that language. In short, one is not
born cosmopolitan, but becomes so in an act of unlimited devotion and
respect and by taking on an endless debt to a foreign reality. The elation
of playing in several keys, on several keyboards requires the incorporation
