05 July 2006

A Bit About Expatriatism

The floating head to your left is Ernest Hemingway. He is sort of your penultimate American expat - he enlisted to serve in the US ambulance corps in World War I and never turned his back on that continent. Hemingway's Europe of the 1920s appealed to his generation much the same way the Europe of the 90s and 00s appeals to mine - it's a new frontier, particularly "East" Europe, that is former communist Europe (because Vienna is farther east than Prague is). In the 1920s, the frontier of America, which had sustained America's adventurers for 300 years, was dead. Defeated. But in the cafes of Paris - well, there was a new adventure brimming . . .

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