(4 of 5)
The most awesome thing to learn about America is the land itself. No newcomer is ever prepared for its size: the vastness of a country that is a continent. The quintessential American landscape is not found in the mountains or on the shore but in the Great Plains. Space (terrestrial space, not space out there) is the true metaphor for the American condition. Speed can conquer it, but nothing built by man can dominate it. That is perhaps one reason why even the most imposing American skylines can look strangely impermanent and fragile. America does not build for the ages. There are no American palaces and no (convincing) American cathedrals.
But the beauty of America is not in its buildings, not in its artifacts or its arts. Its greatest beauty is in its ideas. Freedom is the ultimate value, whether aesthetic or political. Sooner or later most immigrants learn that freedom is not about what one wants but about what one can do and, ultimately, must do. Freedom won't let one be. It pursues one relentlessly, like a secular hound of heaven, challenging, provoking, driving.
The absence of orthodoxy, the lack of any fixed intellectual system is sometimes hard to bear, especially for many older immigrants; it is easier for the young. And it is often the children who truly lead the elders into America, the sons who take their fathers to their first baseball game or shepherd them to their first rock concert or give them a real sense that they have a stake in America's future.
The hardest situation for the immigrant comes when the future seems in doubt and when America seems about to default on its promise. It happened during the Great Depression, and it happened again during Viet Nam. It happens today whenever one contemplates the dark and yet quite visible underside of American life: the New York City subway or the filth of a roadside service station, the American infernos of drugs and crime and sexual decadence, the dregs of the cities -- "wretched refuse" indeed. At such moments it sometimes seems that many of the lands the immigrants left behind are actually doing better than America, that they have in a sense "won." Of course, it is not so. It would be dishonest and thus disloyal to ignore the dreadful scars and blemishes of America, but they are themselves to a large extent the result of freedom -- sometimes an excess of freedom. For freedom can be dangerous. Yet freedom also holds within it the means to correct its defects, for it allows, indeed encourages, people to criticize their society, to tinker with it, to improve it.
Ultimately, the education of every immigrant is personal, individual. No immigrant can speak for all others. But a Viennese librettist, Alfred Grunwald, who came to America in 1940 and sought to continue practicing his art, wrote some lyrics that sum up much of the immigrant experience in America: "Deine Heimat ist wo das Gluck dich grusst . . ." Roughly translated, "Home is where you are happy." Sentimental, perhaps, and certainly not conventionally patriotic, but appropriate for a country that wrote the pursuit of happiness into its founding document.