Politics & Power Quote by John James Audubon

Homesickness, in Audubon, isn t sentimental; it s strategic. The line reads like an exhausted field report from a man who has tested Europe and found it wanting, not just aesthetically but bodily. He doesn t merely prefer America he "long[s]" for it, then sharpens the desire into a hard vow: to go home and "return no more to Europe". That escalation matters. It signals a break with the old-world gravitational pull that still tugged at ambitious artists and naturalists in the early 19th century, when Europe was the cultural capital and America the rough draft.

Audubon frames the choice in the currency a working scientist would respect: "peace of mind" and "Physical comfort". The capital P in "Physical" lands like emphasis, as if he s insisting this is not a romantic thesis but an empirical one. Subtext: Europe may offer prestige, patrons, and polish, but it also brings friction - class anxiety, gatekeeping, perhaps the fatigue of being an outsider. America, for all its volatility, reads to him as a place where his nervous system can unclench.

Context deepens the bite. Audubon was a transatlantic figure, French-born and American-made, selling a vision of American nature to European audiences while personally craving American space. The sentence is a private counterpoint to his public persona: the celebrated naturalist as migrant laborer, measuring continents by what they cost him to inhabit. The rhetoric is plain but loaded; "any portion of the world beside" is totalizing, almost defiant. He isn t praising America as an ideal. He s choosing it as a habitat.