Across the Pond by Terry Eagleton Page A

fact that they need a small crane to swing them out of bed. America is its own norm. It finds it hard to view itself from the outside. It is not greatly taken with cultural comparisons. Euphemism plays a part here too. Obese women are “full figured,” fat children are winsomely “chubby,” and men who need a whole train compartment to themselves are admired for their “hearty appetite.” Beer bellies can be a sign of virility.
    Grossly overweight Americans plod cheerfully around unaware that there are some countries in which they would probably be forced to hide in caves, emerging only at dusk to scavenge great mounds of food and drag it furtively back to their hideouts. In some authoritarian regimes, they might even be flushed off the streets along with beggars and prostitutes when some international sporting event hits town. There is, to be sure, a lot of obesity elsewhere on the planet, but nobody is as mind-warpingly, transcendentally enormous as an enormous American. People who are wide enough to block the aisle of a supermarket can be found in the United States, but are far rarer in Europe, though the numbers are growing, thanks to America’s multinational purveyors of junk food. It is doubtful that many of them are even to be found hiding in caves in the Pyrenees, assuming they could squeeze into them in the first place.
    Perhaps Americans can afford to be obese because they have so much space to expand into. People in the States will say “Excuse me” if they come within ten feet of you, since they are accustomed to having so much of the stuff at their disposal that they expect you to feel intruded on. On the Tokyo subway, by contrast, you can sit in someone’s lap for half an hour without their realising. (On the London Underground they would notice but pretend that you weren’t there, fearful of making a fuss.) It is an attempt to avoid such trespasses that causes me to write so many books. Reading books by other people has always struck me as an unwarranted invasion of their personal space. This is why when I wish to read a book, I write one. It is a way of respecting the privacy of others.
    An English friend of mine who visited the United States for the first time came back with only one scene recorded on his videocamera. It was of a freight train, passing silently and endlessly, apparently without end or origin, with ridiculously more cars than one would see in Europe. It was an image of infinity. Like God, America seems to go on forever. Bits and pieces of it are scattered throughout the globe. It crops up wherever you look, like heartache or cherry blossom. Perhaps there is a secret U.S. colony on Saturn. The nation compensates for the brevity of its history with the boundlessness of its space. The American self is more likely than the European soul to see itself as infinite, partly because it has so little history to hamper it, and partly because it has so much space to spread into. If Europe is smothered beneath history, America languishes for lack of it.
    Bumming a Fag
    When it comes to the body, there is also the question of smoking. One of the several American objections to the habit, one that encapsulates many of the nation’s phobias and anxieties, is that it constitutes a kind of illicit connection between people, shrinking the space to which they can rightfully lay claim. It is a symbolic mingling of bodies, and as such offensive to American individualism. Another objection is that smoking is a pure act of ingestion, one which, unlike eating, lacks all biological value or necessity. As such, it symbolises the transgressive movement, from outer to inner and out again, in its starkest form.
    It is true that the American aversion to smoking is at root eminently rational, given the horrendous consequences of the habit. But the moral fervour with which the subject has been invested in the States, along with the zeal with which the hapless smoker is sometimes hounded, suggests that there is more