I realized that Europeans were beginning to resemble Americans in their attachment to creature comforts, in a certain over-simplification of their inward life and in the cult of technology and sport. I wanted to reassure myself and, bearing in mind the representatives of the new intelligentsia whom I had met in New York, Boston and New Orleans, I tried to show that many Americans were beginning to resemble Europeans: 'America is not a world that stands still, it is constantly shifting. Yesterday's puritans become hard-drinking neurotics, Hemingway characters. The sons of Baptists and Methodists read the New Yorker which satirizes Americanism. In fact, no European will ever be able to debunk America as well as the Americans do it themselves; and in this lies the promise of growth. I am certain that those Americans who criticize America are fervently patriotic. They are the new pioneers; they too are consumed with a fever, but not with "gold fever": they are searching for spiritual values; skyscrapers do not satisfy them, and if they deride these soaring buildings it is not because they prefer shacks but because they prefer soaring thoughts and soaring emotions.'