England and Europe

I never really felt the dramatic separation of England from Europe; of course, I guess I look at culture and aesthetics first rather than politics or economics.  And, having trained as a classicist I am always looking for the fons et origo, and that of course is going to be Greece and Rome.  From that perspective England will always be one of the provinces, and late to join the constellation of civilized states at that.  My mother's people were all from England, coming to the Western Hemisphere in the early seventeenth century; my father's mother had a similar pedigree, but she married a man who had  come from Germany  just before the Civil War, but whose baptismal records  in the church in Halle an der Weser  trace him back a century earlier.  I was raised to foreground Anglo Saxon and Episcopalian in my cultural heritage.  But then I studied Latin and Greek and spent years in Italy and Greece and was caught up in the intoxication of ancient Greek art and architecture, and the literature of Greece and Rome, the drama of the spread of that civilization everywhere, it rebirth in the culture of the Renaissance.  Although I was raised to be staunchly anti Catholic, an inheritance of my Episcopalian mother and atheist father, I could appreciate the remarkable allure of a universal religion and rite ensuring continuity and identity wherever one trod.  I remember once participating as a distinctly non believing but highly enthusiastic spectator in a  Mass of Thanksgiving for the New Year in Paris in Notre Dame Cathedral, and sensing it as part of a greater whole.  I lived in the United States in the German, Scandinavian, Czech, Polish, and Irish Middle West where the German Catholic Church stood on the central square with the Methodist Church, and down the block was the Scotch Presbyterian Church, and not too far away rose the spires of St. Patrick's as well as St. Wenceslaus.  In its own way it was polyglot, preparing me as a teenager for living in Manhattan where the ethnicities were more various and more sharply defined, especially leavened by the dominant mass of Jews.  So when I traveled from London to Rome I felt I was part of a civilization and culture that transcended petty borders, and I rejoiced when after the Second World War there was a movement for unification after the fashion of the USA.  I guess I understand the fatal flaw that the European Union did not take on the debt of the individual countries at the time of union, which was Alexander Hamilton's abiding gift for union to the unifying colonies here in the Western Hemisphere, and I do understand the English repugnance for government by bureaucratic dictat rather than the vote of parlement, and having lived in Athens and Rome, I am always shocked by the indifference to law and order watching acceptable procedure replaced by bribery.  So I should not allow my romantic view of things to blind me to honest grievance; I can only hope that the vase now shattered can somehow be glued back together.  The money men over there as here will call the shots, and I am too ignorant to understand