about them.
Not all Americans, admittedly, are quite as affable as the young men I occasionally bump into on campus. A survey showed that people in Rio touch each other an average of 180 times when drinking coffee together, but only 40 times in New York. Perhaps this is because some Americans believe that touching anything, even their toddlers, is a sure way to contract bubonic plague. There are U.S. citizens who would clearly feel happier spending their lives cocooned in a plastic bag, though some of them might fear that this, too, could result in some loathsome infection. Even if New Yorkers touch each other sparingly, however, the inhabitants of the United States are by and large a more friendly, helpful bunch than the citizens of many a European nation. If you stop on the sidewalk with a map in your hands, they will quite often step up and ask if you need directions.
This tends to happen much less in Europe. In any case, in Britain at least, the art of giving directions on the street is rapidly dying, along with clog dancing and tapestry weaving, as people mistake left for right, omit vital pieces of information, grossly underestimate distances in order to raise your spirits, forget about one-way traffic systems, and take local knowledge complacently for granted. Perhaps the art fares better in the United States. Some of the Irish enjoy turning their road signs around in order to confuse visitors. It is possible for tourists to travel in circles for many hours in the Irish countryside, given the mischievous tendencies of the natives.
The British tend to be suspicious of instant friendliness. There are posters on garbage cans in O’Hare Airport in Chicago that read “We’re Glad To See You!” No they’re not. They don’t even know who I am. How do they know I’m here? Glad to see me personally, or just glad to see anybody? Who exactly is glad to see me? The mayor, the airport authorities, the garbage can manufacturers, or the entire population of the city? How do they know I don’t have a test-tube full of lethal germs in my suitcase, or a collapsible nuclear weapon? What if I have come to sell heroin to their teenagers?
Such are the churlish reflections of a visitor from the United Kingdom.
Openness and Obliquity
“I know of no other country,” writes de Tocqueville, “where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts.” In Ireland, a store will probably let you off a few cents if you find yourself short. It is not certain that this would happen in New York. Irish builders also tend to place coins in the foundations of houses for good luck. An American friend to whom I mentioned this custom was adamant that it would never happen in the United States. It was the waste, not the superstition, he thought was the problem. Perhaps American suburbs would resound at night with the sound of people frantically digging up their neighbours’ foundations. There is an enormous amount of generosity in the States, but not much of it extends to the financial sphere.
Even so, being so brashly explicit about money is part of America’s openness. In Britain, the oldest capitalist nation in the world, it is not done to discuss the stuff too often or too loudly, whereas one knows one is back in the United States when everyone at the hotel breakfast seems to be talking about dollars. The British can be coyly euphemistic about what Americans candidly call the bottom line. British universities “appoint” their academic staff rather than “hiring” them. One hires plumbers, not professors. (There are those of us who find it gratifying, by the way, that another word for “godly” in early Puritan America was “professor.”)
Perhaps one origin of this evasiveness is that aristocrats traditionally had so much money that they did not need to think about it, and so did not need to talk about it either. This is also true of Henry James’s fabulously wealthy characters. True gentility means having only the vaguest
Not all Americans, admittedly, are quite as affable as the young men I occasionally bump into on campus. A survey showed that people in Rio touch each other an average of 180 times when drinking coffee together, but only 40 times in New York. Perhaps this is because some Americans believe that touching anything, even their toddlers, is a sure way to contract bubonic plague. There are U.S. citizens who would clearly feel happier spending their lives cocooned in a plastic bag, though some of them might fear that this, too, could result in some loathsome infection. Even if New Yorkers touch each other sparingly, however, the inhabitants of the United States are by and large a more friendly, helpful bunch than the citizens of many a European nation. If you stop on the sidewalk with a map in your hands, they will quite often step up and ask if you need directions.
This tends to happen much less in Europe. In any case, in Britain at least, the art of giving directions on the street is rapidly dying, along with clog dancing and tapestry weaving, as people mistake left for right, omit vital pieces of information, grossly underestimate distances in order to raise your spirits, forget about one-way traffic systems, and take local knowledge complacently for granted. Perhaps the art fares better in the United States. Some of the Irish enjoy turning their road signs around in order to confuse visitors. It is possible for tourists to travel in circles for many hours in the Irish countryside, given the mischievous tendencies of the natives.
The British tend to be suspicious of instant friendliness. There are posters on garbage cans in O’Hare Airport in Chicago that read “We’re Glad To See You!” No they’re not. They don’t even know who I am. How do they know I’m here? Glad to see me personally, or just glad to see anybody? Who exactly is glad to see me? The mayor, the airport authorities, the garbage can manufacturers, or the entire population of the city? How do they know I don’t have a test-tube full of lethal germs in my suitcase, or a collapsible nuclear weapon? What if I have come to sell heroin to their teenagers?
Such are the churlish reflections of a visitor from the United Kingdom.
Openness and Obliquity
“I know of no other country,” writes de Tocqueville, “where love of money has such a grip on men’s hearts.” In Ireland, a store will probably let you off a few cents if you find yourself short. It is not certain that this would happen in New York. Irish builders also tend to place coins in the foundations of houses for good luck. An American friend to whom I mentioned this custom was adamant that it would never happen in the United States. It was the waste, not the superstition, he thought was the problem. Perhaps American suburbs would resound at night with the sound of people frantically digging up their neighbours’ foundations. There is an enormous amount of generosity in the States, but not much of it extends to the financial sphere.
Even so, being so brashly explicit about money is part of America’s openness. In Britain, the oldest capitalist nation in the world, it is not done to discuss the stuff too often or too loudly, whereas one knows one is back in the United States when everyone at the hotel breakfast seems to be talking about dollars. The British can be coyly euphemistic about what Americans candidly call the bottom line. British universities “appoint” their academic staff rather than “hiring” them. One hires plumbers, not professors. (There are those of us who find it gratifying, by the way, that another word for “godly” in early Puritan America was “professor.”)
Perhaps one origin of this evasiveness is that aristocrats traditionally had so much money that they did not need to think about it, and so did not need to talk about it either. This is also true of Henry James’s fabulously wealthy characters. True gentility means having only the vaguest
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