There is a recent Russian film. I can't recall the title, set in a small town by an industrial port. One of the workers has come there with the secret plan of swimming to one of the American freighters and defecting. He befriends a local youth, and there's some Bildung -- the space race is on, and there's the cult of the astronaut -- while the fellow is relentlessly training in the gym, planning his bid for freedom. Long story short, he misses the timing, and swims after the departing freighter, presumably perishing in the attempt, and the young boy finds himself in Moscow, randomly face to face with an astronaut at a victory parade, and hands him a bouquet of flowers.
There is more space than one might think between nations, and it's easy to be lost in the space between. From this, in a pragmatic sense, I take the lesson that I need to be a bit more tenacious if I manage to make it back across to the more neutral European countries. Heretofore, I had thought of it as a bit of a temporary refuge while nomading, and was grateful for the minimally sufficient life and culture that I was able to secure. And I tried to return the gift by writing as much cultural criticism as I could. But life is more serious than one might think at first, and given the inexplicable, extraordinary difficulties that I am facing in my own country, I need to become more interested in the other lands that I visit. There is only one life to be had, and I need to be alert to every possible path to an existence that could support worthwhile work, whether in the arts, or the law, or just writing and reading.
I've taken up the habit of the occasional predawn psaltery of the liturgy of the hours. An old form -- the text is hard to find for free in Latin in the right format. Originally, I was using a 16th c. version, but the source website shifted to an early 20th c. version, so I followed along. It is valuable, in that it clears the channel. When one awakens in the city, one doesn't necessarily awaken in one's true capacities. Like good animals. we learn what comportment to have in order to survive, and we default to that. But the true capacities of the human, including the sheer effrontery of addressing heaven before sunrise, isn't necessarily in the urban worker's skillset. People have been pointing this out at least since Plato, but the city has a distorting effect on us political animals. I think industrialization has deepened the problem in two dimensions. First, the worst of the grotesques, and there are many of them, seem to be barely human. Second, proximity to the center of the civilization doesn't seem to have a humanizing effect. The wealthy, as far as I can tell from occasional conversations and reading their sorts of news sources, seem completely lost in a more genteel fashion. In the early 20th c. many of the anti-soviet cultures had, perhaps in response to the humanism at the center of socialist revolutionary thought, a cult of the ideal human. You see this in the art in the figures of steely determination -- not the carefully rendered musculature of Bernini's monumental Roman sculpture or its inspirations in the sketeches of the renaissance, but looming, iron figures of human-scale strength. I noticed this phenomenon clearly in the Croatian churches of Bosnia.
Perhaps to blunt these twin dangers of the idealized human, modern industrial civilization in the West seems increasingly to encourage a sort of blurry incapacity in its citizens. The focus is on personal contentment in a more Epicurean sense. The political and economic calculus is explicitly based on happiness, and while the absence of pain is a good thing, once this metric moves into a more positivist scale, the search for happiness can become a bit manipulable and meretricious.
My country does have its own spiritual resources, as far as they might be from the culture of the present, and I've sought them out. There is a distinctly American way of hearing the different drummer, and one can use this cultural space to set up a Walden of one's own in which to live as deliberately as possible. But again, this is very far from the present state of the culture collectively, so even though this path is distinctly American in provenance, those taking the path become hostem humanes generis in the hyper-real corporatist culture of the age.
As a consequence, one does need to imagine oneself into a place of sufficient freedom -- but what distinguishes this from madness, or swimming out to sea in blind faith, is that the imagined space becomes a place in which it is possible to exercise the powers of reason in freedom. That is both the desideratum and the place of finding it -- the capacity of thinking, the possibility of thinking, and the place of the possibility of thinking are, in a pragmatic sense, the same. The dancer, the dance, the music and the stage are a mereological unity, a single phenomenon of capacity of expression and its proper place in the world.