There is a moment that happens in Europe every spring, in offices from Porto to Tampere, and it is so ordinary that nobody has ever thought to make a fuss about it.
Someone leans into a doorway and says: “I’m taking the last three weeks of July.” And the colleague looks up and says, “Lucky you” and that is the entire negotiation.
The holiday was not granted, because it was never anyone’s to grant. It was already there, sitting in the law like a fire exit, put in place by people who assumed that a human being who works for forty-eight weeks might reasonably want the other four to look at the sea.
I find this quietly astonishing, and I think most Europeans have entirely stopped noticing it, which is the whole problem with good fortune. It becomes wallpaper. You cannot see the water you swim in.
So a Slovakian warehouse worker, a Danish dentist and a Portuguese bus driver all share something the richest country on earth does not guarantee at all: a legal certainty that some portion of their one and only life belongs to them.
Europe has some eight and a half thousand kilometres of genuine high-speed line. The United States has roughly eighty, a stretch in New England where the Acela is briefly permitted to behave like a proper train before slowing down for a level crossing in Connecticut. Eighty kilometres, in a country that put twelve men on the moon. What that means on an ordinary morning is that a woman in Lyon can decide over breakfast to have lunch in Paris, and will spend the journey reading a novel and watching sunflower fields go past at three hundred kilometres an hour.
She will not think of this as a marvel. She will think the coffee is overpriced, which it is.
Take, more seriously, the thing that does not happen. American families go bankrupt because someone in them got sick, roughly half a million households a year, a city the size of Kansas City wiped out annually by an illness that arrived uninvited. In most European languages there is no natural phrase for this. You can construct one, the way you can construct a sentence about a purple horse. A Spanish family whose father has a stroke on a Sunday afternoon experiences the worst day of their lives, and it is only the worst day of their lives. It does not also become the day they lost the house.
And then there is the drill that European children do not practise. The gun death rate in the United States is something like fourteen times the European figure. I am not going to lecture anyone about the Second Amendment, which is not my constitution. I only want to point at the lived texture of it. There is a particular slackness in the shoulders of a mother in Vienna at half past three, walking to the school gate, thinking about dinner and nothing else. She has never rehearsed what she would do if her phone rang with that news.
Everything else radiates outward from the same choices. Roughly five extra years of life expectancy, which sounds like an actuarial abstraction until you convert it into currency that matters: eighteen hundred more mornings, five more Christmases, a decent chance of being at the wedding rather than the empty chair mentioned in the speech.
I want to be careful here, because smugness is the least attractive thing Europe does and it does it enthusiastically. Its economies grow like a glacier retreating, its bureaucracy could exhaust a saint, its housing markets are eating its young, and it spent thirty years assuming somebody else would defend it. A European reading this while waiting for a delayed regional service to Vercelli is entitled to a hollow laugh.
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