The World's Oldest Child

Mid-tour report in Western Europe

Twenty-two countries visited in my short life and I’ve never gotten over the surprise of hearing people abroad speak languages other than English and Spanish. Of mannerisms and ways of seeing the world that are influenced by their Other Language, their Other Food, their Other Myths and Other Sets of Common Sense. The surprise is only stronger when we look alike.

Two weeks into this tour I’m feeling like Western Europe is childlike, because it’s quaint, but also impossibly mature, because it’s old. That it’s the center of the world and very far from it. Most people anywhere feel like their country or maybe even their town is god’s backyard. (If they don’t, they try to leave for the US, this century’s most famous of all god’s backyards.) In some of the smaller economies of Europe, it’s hard to see how anyone could feel that way. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong.

Who’s to say the sense that you live Where It’s At should have anything to do with power or trade? Maybe it should have everything to do with whether your narrow, anciently paved streets are pleasant to walk through, whether there are independent chocolatiers to sample from and third places galore, each with a weathered wooden door.

I’m tempted to mistake the continent’s quaintness for naivete. To look down my nose at these countries without a cardinal sin of segregation to reckon with, without guns behind every door and underneath every pillow, without the weight—largely self-imposed—of being the world’s corrupt cop, banker, mediator, idol, and protector, all in one (even though some of them formerly occupied that role). But it would be stupid to do that. Because however adorable these millennia-old towns are, however far to the sidelines even once-massive imperial powers (like Holland) are cast now, every country in Western Europe is entwined with the earth-shaking history and influence of the continent at large.

Over the past few days we traveled through what I would call a spectrum of Austria. We started in a western town where the venue was so painfully forward-thinking that no one was allowed to work or rest shirtless in the sweltering heat, not even we artists in the privacy of the backstage—to a festival in a south central town where seemingly nobody wore a shirt, shoes, or pants, whether they were a festival-goer or a festival employee.

Isn’t that the spectrum of Europe in general? A brain lobe that’s so focused on order that it would rather deprive everyone of a basic comfort than extend it to those who didn’t formerly have it, and a lobe that parties in the garden, throws bacchanals, hangs out with their tits out?

Soon, we’ll get out of the suburbs and back into the central cities, the seats from which monarchs used to put their nubile thumbs on the scales of everyone else’s lives. I’ve never played Paris before. I think I know which lobe of the European brain is dominant there.

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