Britannia revisited

Andrew Sullivan, now a green card holder, is just back from a sojourn in his native England. He hadn't been back for five years. "The stops on the train journey from my Sussex home to London are exactly the same, almost a long-forgotten mantra of Englishness to me: Hurst Green, Oxted, Woldingham, Upper Warlingham, Riddlesdown, Sanderstead ... The names reassure. And after you’ve lived in America, the sheer depth of each tiny stop, the generations that have lived there or near there for centuries, the overwhelming sense of real place you feel is something I once took easily for granted. Now it has the shock of the old, a sudden remembrance that this little island really does have an identity, a character. ... it seems a country that still makes sense; that has come to terms with itself; a country that, unlike my new home, America, is not in the midst of a cold civil war." As usual, Sully pens a lovely essay. Spend some time with it here.