A resolve to become Polish suggests some dissatisfaction with America, being American. After fifty years of having been, I must cop to a certain, even a radical, discontent. A distinct and elemental and unyielding exasperation, though not, in the end, a disabling one. I like my country well enough. It has its moments and special places. But America has always loomed too large and just too much generally for me to love with any kind of intimacy or enthusiasm. I myself am not large, and while I have been known to contradict myself, I do not contain multitudes. The exuberant, the omniveros, the generous Walt Whitman sang a patriotism far too expansive for me. I prefer the paean of a more central American, that of Jose Emilio Pacheco, a Mexican.
I do not love my country. Its abstract splendor
is beyond my grasp.
But (and I know it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, castles,
a rundown city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history,
mountains
(and three or four rivers).
Which is not to say that I hate my country or regret my being and having been an American, I don’t. Rather, one comes to understand that the fullness of life, the fullness of being human, perhaps even a full understanding of being American, may require more than a single national experience. (How many such fullness may require, I do not know, only that I have to get started.) Something about small countries attracts me, the limitedness of non-superpowers, of subject states, underdogs, lost causes, even of the defeated, and this style of patriotism, which Pacheco slyly names “High Treason.”
