The Benedict option, the time bubble, and you

by istván.

2022. június 1.

“If you want to see how people in India lived 100 years ago, look at Indians in the UK.”

An Indian man said this to me in 2005 in Beijing. At the time, I couldn't imagine how it would define my own life. What he was describing was the final form of culture in an alien world.

There comes a point in expatriation, perhaps after five or six years of total disconnection, where you evolve into the epitome of your culture. It’s caused by the gradual and inevitable loss of connections with your home country, an inability to integrate into your host country, and the people around you coming to you for definitive answers on all things “you people.”

I am 1999.

With sources of cultural renewal cut off, you can only answer current questions with past knowledge. Within a few years, the people with an interest in “your culture” who are coming to you to ask about “you people” know more about what “you people” are doing than you do.

Occasionally you connect with someone you knew in your home country and they say, “Oh, of course you know about *the thing*.”

Only you don’t.

Gradually, a period sets in where you find yourself speaking the same language but utterly unable to understand what the motherlander is talking about.

That was the moment I realized I was an island.

Many have called for “the Benedict option,” which advises Christians to form hermitages so they can continue living as Christians in our post-virtue clown kingdom. Essentially expat bubbles. Be the aggressively Irish third-generation immigrant who still speaks the language better than his modern peers and whose English bears a hereditary brogue.

It isn’t easy. The market doesn’t care about you.

It starts with food.

I found myself having to become an expert baker. No matter how much money I was willing to spend, nothing tasted right. Then came mastering all the old recipes for lángos, gulyásleves, and töltött káposzta.

From food, your move on to making soap. And then clothing. And then furniture. Congratulations: you’re Amish.

The part that no one ever seems to talk about is how you can never go back. When the train of culture leaves the station it does not come back for stragglers.

Three years back in America, I am as clueless about these strange people in this strange land as I was speaking to the newly-arrived American after a decade abroad.

Everything here is absurd. Beyond absurd, really, because while the river and the tree are as I remember, the world is peopled with extraterrestrials.

There is no reintegration.

You’re a 40-year-old senior citizen confused about why you can’t buy bar soap anymore. The bath shampoo doesn’t work. You begin to suspect the freaks around you aren’t even cleaning themselves properly.

You go to Church and discover the unchanging words of scripture have a hip new translation. The songs of the mass have all changed. “And also with you” has become “And with you in spirit.” The tabernacle is even harder to find.

The money looks different.

And the politics. Oh, the politics. When you left you were a default liberal, and now the only people who share your values are “literal Nazis.”

In many ways, you face an even more hopeless situation than someone who just moved to the country.

No one expects someone who just got out of The Gambia to understand the ins and outs of why it’s essential that boys who believe they are girls should be showing their penises to your daughter in the elementary school bathroom. But you are supposed to know, and you will be all the more hated for not knowing.

There are enemies in every direction, and they are champing at the bit to kill you for having the audacity to have a different lived experience than them, while also demanding we all acknowledge and understand everyone’s lived experience.

This is my lived experience.

I long for the nursing home, where I might enjoy some quality time with the last remaining human who plays pinochle so I can remember what was before our species goes extinct.