1
UNDER the grey skies and the disheartening rains of this autumnal July, I think of the light which I have left behind me. I have left it down there, on the now empty shores of the Mediterranean, and I ask myself in vain why I parted from it. Yet I was one of the last to tear myself away. All the others leave in the early days of April, recalled by legendary memories of the deceitful spring-tides of the north, nor do they realize that they are losing a great happiness.
It is good, it is wise to escape, amid the blue of sea and sky, the icy months of our winters, dismal as punishment; but, although in the south these months are warmer and above all more luminous than ours, they do not quite make up to us for the darkness and the frost of our native climes. The brightest and warmest hours, in spite of all, retain an after-taste of cloud and snow; they are beautiful, but timid; swiftly and fearfully they hasten towards the night. Now man, who is born of the sun, like all things, has need of his hereditary portion of primitive heat and all-pervading light. He has within him numberless deep-seated cells which retain the memory of the resplendent days of the prime and become unhappy when they cannot reap their harvest of rays. Man can live in the gloom, but at long last he loses the smile and the confidence that are so essential. Because of our twilit summers it becomes indispensable to restore the balance between darkness and light and sometimes to drive away, by superb excesses of sunshine, the cold and the dark that invade our very souls.