about myself again
In 18 days I will be back home.
I have lived for nearly 9 months in New York. My enthusiasm for the energy has not waned, but I do not think of it as home. Slowly I am snookering myself. I can not live in a city for the rest of my life, and I do not intend to center my life in a country with as much ignorance and lack of class as America. However separate NY may feel, the things I love about the place are entwined with those things I hate. The confidence, for example, and the attitude of continual self-empowerment. Without substance, both become irritating.
There are wonderful things in this country, and its temporary domination of the world is understandable. This is a powerful society. It is as remarkably different from England as Australia is remarkably similar.
I cannot thrive in a city like Brisbane. It represents to me the safety and comfort of a culture that has no history and no traditions but fosters a resistance to individuality and a fear of change.
I have always been critical of Australia in this way and some of my friends have been critical of me for this.
My home is Australia, I cannot deny that. But I do not want to live at home.
Recently I have been more energetic than usual. I have met more people than ever before, and seen more, and I have changed - perhaps as profoundly as after my travels in Africa and Europe. But my attempts to write about it have floundered. I cannot explain the dearth of inspiration. It is, perhaps, a sense of inevitable failure.
I cannot truly express how I feel about the myriad little things about my new life that cheer me, nor capture the depressions without self-aggrandizing.
Whatever my mood, when I walk through the streets of New York I am often moved to smile and chuckle. There is a freedom to be short with people here, a freedom to dispense with pleasantries. This does not exist in Brisbane, and the lack of it frustrates me. I am a polite person but distrust polite people and find their company suffocating.
My childhood was wonderful, and I wish almost every day that I could recapture it - which is as it should be. A delightful nostalgia. But throughout my childhood my attitude was us and them. I often felt apart from the society. I had many good friends, some recognisably stalwarts of Australian culture. I felt though, absurd as it may sound, like an outsider grown up in Australia.
Here in America, I am an Australian, even typical. And I like that.
There is a duality to my opinions and emotions that I have tried to express before. The strength of my excitement for New York imparts strength to the taste of bile that rises in me at the lack of class in parts of the culture. It is enough for me to turn on my television to wish immediately for a plane back home.
I find little time for what I enjoy. I enjoy writing and I enjoy playing the piano. I enjoy, above all, exploring. My explorations are constant and necessary, but through habit and circumstance my explorations are most often menial and time-wasting.
That is, perhaps, as it should be.
I have lived for nearly 9 months in New York. My enthusiasm for the energy has not waned, but I do not think of it as home. Slowly I am snookering myself. I can not live in a city for the rest of my life, and I do not intend to center my life in a country with as much ignorance and lack of class as America. However separate NY may feel, the things I love about the place are entwined with those things I hate. The confidence, for example, and the attitude of continual self-empowerment. Without substance, both become irritating.
There are wonderful things in this country, and its temporary domination of the world is understandable. This is a powerful society. It is as remarkably different from England as Australia is remarkably similar.
I cannot thrive in a city like Brisbane. It represents to me the safety and comfort of a culture that has no history and no traditions but fosters a resistance to individuality and a fear of change.
I have always been critical of Australia in this way and some of my friends have been critical of me for this.
My home is Australia, I cannot deny that. But I do not want to live at home.
Recently I have been more energetic than usual. I have met more people than ever before, and seen more, and I have changed - perhaps as profoundly as after my travels in Africa and Europe. But my attempts to write about it have floundered. I cannot explain the dearth of inspiration. It is, perhaps, a sense of inevitable failure.
I cannot truly express how I feel about the myriad little things about my new life that cheer me, nor capture the depressions without self-aggrandizing.
Whatever my mood, when I walk through the streets of New York I am often moved to smile and chuckle. There is a freedom to be short with people here, a freedom to dispense with pleasantries. This does not exist in Brisbane, and the lack of it frustrates me. I am a polite person but distrust polite people and find their company suffocating.
My childhood was wonderful, and I wish almost every day that I could recapture it - which is as it should be. A delightful nostalgia. But throughout my childhood my attitude was us and them. I often felt apart from the society. I had many good friends, some recognisably stalwarts of Australian culture. I felt though, absurd as it may sound, like an outsider grown up in Australia.
Here in America, I am an Australian, even typical. And I like that.
There is a duality to my opinions and emotions that I have tried to express before. The strength of my excitement for New York imparts strength to the taste of bile that rises in me at the lack of class in parts of the culture. It is enough for me to turn on my television to wish immediately for a plane back home.
I find little time for what I enjoy. I enjoy writing and I enjoy playing the piano. I enjoy, above all, exploring. My explorations are constant and necessary, but through habit and circumstance my explorations are most often menial and time-wasting.
That is, perhaps, as it should be.
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