Thoughts Over Europe

Rabat, Morocco

So here I am, in Morocco.

But the journey was part of the fun, of course, and I’d like to write about that for a bit if you’ll indulge me.

Dulles was an adventure. First time getting out there, the new experience of taking the 5A from Rosslyn in a Metrobus booking it along the highway at 60 mph. A bit anxious by the line at the Air France counter but I have three hours until my flight. The Russian man behind me is extremely nervous and keeps trying to cut in front of me. We are getting on the same flight, buddy. Food court and bad pizza: next to me a middle aged white dude with a budding paunch carries on inappropriate and chauvinistic conversations about his escapades with female flight attendants and Thai sex workers. Not a conversation for polite company but I can’t tear myself away from the Chaucerian trainwreck gushing forth from this ex (?) pilot.

Boarding the plane it’s all very chipper “bienvenue a bord” and “bonjour” which is kind of thrilling. An American traveller is going apoplectic about not getting the upgraded seat she paid for. Much scurrying and torrents of French vowels. We’re all going to be ok, and sure enough we are. Doors close. The short skip across the Atlantic. (Post-O’Hare-New Delhi everything is in a new context.) Highlights include the adorable Portuguese (?) couple in front of me, the husband especially, who bounces up and down on his calves in the aisle with his cognac. Maybe too much cognac, there, sailor.

The day/night global map won't come up on the touchscreen, but we are flying into the darkness. It is kind of fascinating. After hugging the Atlantic Coast for a while, flying toward Nova Scotia, we will eventually be over the Atlantic and flying into a massive embankment of darkness called night. That global rotating blanket of silence and sleep. The night will fall quickly, not only because night is falling, but we are actually flying into the falling night. Kind of astounding, these modern miracles of transportation.

We cross the English Channel (“I see England, I see France…”). From the map on the back of the seat in front of me I make out what I think is Calais below us, bright in the early morning darkness.

Europe. Looking down from the plane at that shadowy, sleeping continent. Under a deep purple blanket of rippled clouds which I mistook for forest originally, this thriving, pulsing continent. Full of wars and palaces, bloodshed and invention, art and magnificence. I thought about the people on the plane, these proud, funny French people. These Gauls who gave it to the Romans, these proud Frenchmen who died in the trenches against the Kaiser. And suddenly a European peace? For at least two thousand years all Europe could think about was itself: violence and war all turned against each other. Centuries of it. Conquest and alliance and battle and competition. And then suddenly the spasm of two epic wars where the continent committed to a mutual suicide pact (a former college professor’s term). And destroyed itself, with a too-long economic Armageddon in between, just for good measure. Then their eyes slowly opened and the difference between French and German, German and English, English and Swede did not seem so far apart. Suddenly the outward threat of communism would force them and their economic systems together into awkward cooperation out of mutual interest. The Cold War was the crucible in which a modern, peaceful, productive Europe was born. How long it lasts, who knows.

The landscape seemed so foreign too. These beautiful patches of green, brown and tan farms all pieced together. And these little towns looked like they were fit in where the farms didn't quite join right. The leftover land was for the towns. And such extreme compactness: as few roads and houses and buildings as possible. Land is a premium on this crowded, competitive continent. It kind of astounds me: these fields, these forests - this is where ancient Roman, those ambitious Italians, battled with the obstinate Gauls. This is where the machine gunners slaughtered each other along the Maginot Line. What a world of history below me.

So, Europe. And all us people. The bouncing Portuguese, the apoplectic Americans, the anxious Russians, the cocky (sorry) ex-pilots, the chipper French flight attendants. We’re all in this together. Through all this time. People and countries. All together.

And then this line comes back to me, from The Lion in Winter: “We are the world in small. A nation is a human thing. It does what we do, for our reasons. Surely if we're civilized, we can put away the knives.”

Surely we can hope we will.