He declares again that style is being able to see, think, feel, and nothing more.
Now that I am no longer young the prose of Loti has the same power, the same almost fateful charm over me, it had in my youth. How he keeps words in place! I did not see my own youth; I saw only his. By it I have kept a proxy perhaps by means of which I shall not grow old.
I wonder if there is anything in the fact that we were born almost upon the same day, month, and the stars keep for us still the fervent memory of rare emotional moments which have perished!
I have never seen anyone else who could do the same thing to words. He can spread apart their boundaries, then crowd and crush them edgefull with meaning. He can make them glowing and magnificently iridescent, like the necks of the wild ducks he used to hunt in the misty autumn in Camargue.
He has loved the things I have loved. And among them Sicily. Hear what he writes of this island over which almost all great civilizations have at one time or another swept.
He was in Siracusa at the time; in January, the month of his birth and mine; and almost the day. The year was in his diary:
“A classic land; ancient olive trees; and always snowy Ætna sparkling above the clouds. I see again before me landscapes of old Italian painters; ruins, pastoral scenes, shepherds, goats. I feel the sad charm of winter. But it is a winter so gentle I am not surprised to see palms, flowers, cacti. Siracusa keeps the melancholy, the expanding mystery, of the Middle Age.
“Tonight I saw upon the Gulf a sunset of Italy. High up, Ætna kept glowing like a brasier. When I came back to the ship I carried a bouquet of wild anemones, the hue of pale violets, plucked by some ancient temple.”
I am glad to have an opportunity to see the remainder of the diaries of Loti’s youth. And what a youth it was! Do you know of another so splendid? It was enhanced by contact (comprehension) with the beauties of creation. And while he was writing his account of it, I, in a far, lonely, wind-swept prairie village was living his youth with him. I was caring almost nothing for the people or the things about me. Instead, I was climbing the mountain highways of Persia, with Loti, to look upon Persepolis, and dream of the face of that Greek courtesan for whom Alexander the Great gave order that it be burned.