Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
shed a hundred pounds if they were to discover that everyone in Armenia or Montenegro is
as skinny as Victoria Beckham. Even so, the fact that the United States constitutes a whole
universe of its own may make people less troubled by the fact that they need a small crane
to swing them out of bed. America is its own norm. It finds it hard to view itself from the
outside. It is not greatly taken with cultural comparisons. Euphemism plays a part here too.
Obese women are “full figured,” fat children are winsomely “chubby,” and men who need
a whole train compartment to themselves are admired for their “hearty appetite.” Beer bel-
lies can be a sign of virility.
Grossly overweight Americans plod cheerfully around unaware that there are some
countries in which they would probably be forced to hide in caves, emerging only at dusk to
scavenge great mounds of food and drag it furtively back to their hideouts. In some author-
itarian regimes, they might even be flushed off the streets along with beggars and prostitu-
tes when some international sporting event hits town. There is, to be sure, a lot of obesity
elsewhere on the planet, but nobody is as mind-warpingly, transcendentally enormous as an
enormous American. People who are wide enough to block the aisle of a supermarket can
be found in the United States, but are far rarer in Europe, though the numbers are growing,
thanks to America's multinational purveyors of junk food. It is doubtful that many of them
are even to be found hiding in caves in the Pyrenees, assuming they could squeeze into
them in the first place.
Perhaps Americans can afford to be obese because they have so much space to expand
into. People in the States will say “Excuse me” if they come within ten feet of you, since
they are accustomed to having so much of the stuff at their disposal that they expect you to
feel intruded on. On the Tokyo subway, by contrast, you can sit in someone's lap for half an
hour without their realising. (On the London Underground they would notice but pretend
that you weren't there, fearful of making a fuss.) It is an attempt to avoid such trespasses
that causes me to write so many topics. Reading topics by other people has always struck
me as an unwarranted invasion of their personal space. This is why when I wish to read a
topic, I write one. It is a way of respecting the privacy of others.
An English friend of mine who visited the United States for the first time came back with
only one scene recorded on his videocamera. It was of a freight train, passing silently and
endlessly, apparently without end or origin, with ridiculously more cars than one would see
in Europe. It was an image of infinity. Like God, America seems to go on forever. Bits and
pieces of it are scattered throughout the globe. It crops up wherever you look, like heartache
or cherry blossom. Perhaps there is a secret U.S. colony on Saturn. The nation compensates
for the brevity of its history with the boundlessness of its space. The American self is more
likely than the European soul to see itself as infinite, partly because it has so little history
to hamper it, and partly because it has so much space to spread into. If Europe is smothered
beneath history, America languishes for lack of it.
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