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PARTISAN REVIEW
of another world's structure, a modest and thankless apprenticeship to a
foreign culture with its formidable opaqueness. Knowledge ennobles only
to the degree that the measures taken to acquire it were excessive.
If
all
normal education is an act of violence on a child, destroying his inno–
cence and all gentle comforts in order to establish him in the realm of the
word, then a cosmopolitan education is destruction to the nth degree, a
very dearly paid access to a superior liberty. Moving from one civilization
to another is a mutation, a metamorphosis that requires work and suffer–
ing and has nothing to do with a jet's painless connecting of all points on
the planet. That is why those without homelands constitute the nobility
and antennae of the spirit; men of crossroads, straddling borders, they
possess an acuity normal men lack. They perceive things that common
men cannot see. As outsiders they possess greater insight and are more
unsettled. They reveal the essential, disrupt certitudes, and disclose the se–
crets of closed societies. They have had the courage to leave behind the
comfort of a single family, of a single place in search of beauty in other
parts of the world. They are condemned to remain exceptions (but nec–
essary exceptions: the disappearance of Jewish communities in Central
and Eastern Europe, aside from Hungary, is a spiritual catastrophe with–
out precedent). What is Vienna without Jews? A swollen head atop a tiny
body, a museum-city without substance, a mausoleum lacking both spirit
and taste.
It
is impossible, unthinkable to turn cosmopolitanism into a
right similar to health or housing by democratizing it. Even if there are a
thousand forms, a thousand degrees, a thousand nuances, it will always
remain the exclusive realm of a small number.
Transplanting oneself to a foreign culture always entails discomfort
because each people possesses its particular individuality, even if only
through a language which is not immediately translatable into another,
and because dark regions that cannot be illuminated exist between coun–
tries. (Consider simply the divisions between Catholic Europe and
Protestant Europe.) Exoticism as well as racism will persist even into the
most ideal future as they cannot be eliminated without destroying what
creates them: the strangeness of the other.
If
each culture is an absolute
unto itself, all cultures are not complementary but supplementary. They
surpass and cover up each other like jungle vines. The universe is hostile
because I do not know it all and allergies are born of diversity. War, in–
comprehension, suspicion are not first and foremost the fruits of man's
wickedness, but come from witnessing the many expressions of being that
cause fear and panic. Relations with the foreign are an indissoluble mix of
attraction and repulsion.
If
uprootedness and the loss of domestic security
were not a painful asceticism, migration would simply be a matter of trav–
eling throughout the universe as blood circulates in our veins.
In
short,
