Coming to terms with cultural change in Europe

I haven't been writing much lately but it is important to me to keep some sort of diary going which is accessible to friends, relations and other interested parties. My focus lately has been on Substack but I also want to keep this site active. Reprinted here, then, is my latest Substack piece which has the somewhat unwieldy title, Old memories, current realities: coming to terms with social and cultural change in England and Europe and finding a long-lost friend...

For me the past year has been a time of travel, observation and reflection, and I intend to continue this itinerant lifestyle for the foreseeable future. Not everything has gone smoothly but things have gone well and happily enough for me to want to continue the experiment.

My geopolitical views and opinions have, on the whole, been reinforced as I have followed the events in Ukraine and other areas of conflict or potential conflict. And I have deepened my knowledge of the changes that have occurred and are occurring in Europe and Great Britain, having spent considerable time in the Balkans, Malta and the U.K.. The last six months, spent entirely in England, has been a particularly significant and emotional time for me as I have slowly come to terms with current British social, cultural, political and economic realities.

Though they often become entangled, the personal has always been more important to me than the political. Old memories gain a new lease of life when they are activated and added to, and this process — which can be painful and confronting — has been driving my thoughts and feelings lately in all sorts of ways. I’ve always been fascinated by time and the dynamics of memory, and I’m not alone here: it’s been a perennial literary theme from (at least) the early modern era.

Cultural traditions (including literary and artistic ones for those so inclined) make us who we are. For me, literature and film are important in two main ways: in so far as they reflect the cultures in which they arose; and for the ideas which drive them. Naturally we are drawn to works which reflect a culture with which we feel a strong affinity, attitudes which we share and ideas which we find stimulating.

Artworks only justify themselves, in my view, to the extent that they shape, shake or comfort us; that is, to the extent that they touch individuals at a deep level and nourish the various cultural and transcultural values that we all embody (and so bring to life and carry forward).

I recently had some personal encounters which got me thinking about these matters and about time and memory but privacy concerns prevent me from giving an account of the most significant of these meetings and the communications which led up to it. This encounter involved seeing again an English couple I had not seen or been in touch with for decades.

There is a personal dimension to the story and also a cultural one. The woman in question — who, I readily admit, had made a much greater impression on me than I had on her — influenced my cultural attitudes quite deeply when I was in my twenties. It was fascinating and satisfying to make contact again after so long, and in an England which has changed so radically.

Part of the interest related to seeing to what extent our respective values and attitudes had changed in response to these broader changes as well as to growing older. (Not a lot, as it happens!) But part of the interest was — as is often the case with long-delayed reunions — simply in discovering who remembered what in regard to prior interactions.

The moral of the story (were it to be told) would probably be something along these lines: that the persistence of values and character traits in the respective parties is more important for the possible continuation of a disrupted friendship than a perfect congruence of shared memories.

Calmer and marginally less pessimistic (at least on a personal level), I am leaving England for Germany tomorrow.