Life & Wisdom Quote by Wyndham Lewis

Lewis lands the compliment with a blade: America as a "wholly excellent vacuum", a place made livable not by depth or tradition but by the absence of claims. The line is engineered to sound gracious - "most at home" - then immediately undercut itself. He refuses the easy flattering myth that the United States is "intrinsically" superior. What he praises is a social condition: rootlessness redistributed so evenly it becomes a kind of equality.

The subtext is both envy and indictment. In Europe, belonging is policed by class, accent, ancestry, and the long memory of institutions. An outsider stays an outsider. Lewis, a combative modernist who made a sport of antagonizing cultural orthodoxies, hears in America a different music: the suspicion of pedigree, the speed of reinvention, the way identity can be performed rather than inherited. "No one really belongs" reads as a liberation and a warning. Liberation because it loosens the old gatekeepers; warning because a vacuum can swallow meaning as easily as it clears space for invention.

Context matters: early 20th-century modernists watched nations harden into ideologies, then into carnage. Against that backdrop, the United States can look like an escape hatch from history itself. Lewis makes the escape sound seductive but slightly sickly, like breathing cleaner air that also lacks oxygen. His intent isn’t to romanticize exile; it’s to sketch an unsettling comfort: a society where shared unbelonging becomes the nearest thing to citizenship.