Assuming
this to be the case, the resultant of the ancestral influences operative
upon me would indicate that my geographical parallel lies somewhere
between the Alps and the Pyrenees. Sometimes I am inclined to think that
the Alps and the Pyrenees are all that is European in Europe. Beyond
them I seem to see Asia; below them, Africa.
In the riparian Navarrese, as in the Catalans and the Genovese, one
already notes the African; in the Gaul of central France, as well as in
the Austrian, there is a suggestion of the Chinese.
Clutching the Pyrenees and grafted upon the Alps, I am conscious of
being an Arch-European.
DIONYSIAN OR APOLLONIAN?
Formerly, when I believed that I was both humble and a wanderer, I was
convinced that I was a Dionysian. I was impelled toward turbulence, the
dynamic, the theatric. Naturally, I was an anarchist. Am I today? I
believe I still am. In those days I used to enthuse about the future,
and I hated the past.
Little by little, this turbulence has calmed down--perhaps it was never
very great. Little by little I have come to realize that if following
Dionysus induces the will to bound and leap, devotion to Apollo has a
tendency to throw the mind back until it rests upon the harmony of
eternal form.
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