The individual is passing so rapidly in America, and collective living being substituted, that we can not expect to enjoy again such an exquisite personality. Here the daily paper thinks for us, the Movie feels for us, the radio talks us deaf and dumb, and the department stores put upon us what clothes they wish, while we remain limp and unresisting. Collective living where mind and senses grow dull.
The old arts are dying. They have no place in a mechanical civilization. Man has procured a strangely noisy set of grown-up toys that engross his energies.
I hope that in the struggle for world supremacy which is plainly threatening, the older mind of Asia will triumph sometimes, instead of American mind. A purely commercial civilization is dangerous.
Just as the good go to heaven, it is supposed, sometime, the painters, poets, people who have given me greatest pleasure, go to Sicily.
Pedro-Emilio Coll, that delightful Venezuelan, writes about it. He says: The king starts out to enjoy himself—meaning Blanco-Fombona. For pleasure he went to Palermo to dwell a time under the azure shell of the Sicilian sky confronting an azure sea. Coll goes on to say that ever afterward, Fombona experienced something like homesickness for Sicily.
I myself would much rather live and go to Palermo, than die and go to Heaven. To everyone his Heaven! I wonder why no one thought before of likening Palermo’s rich, old Moorish palaces to the dwellings of Paradise!
Once I wrote to engage rooms in an hotel in Palermo. I had just replied to a publisher a few days before, to a request asking me what my next novel would be, telling him that I had one in mind which I heard in the music of Parsifal. I learned, later, that in the Hotel Des Palms where I had engaged rooms, Wagner finished writing the music of Parsifal, and his last really great writing, on Friday, at the eleventh hour, January 13—almost at the exact moment when I was born.
To reach Sicily I sailed south past Sardinia. Naples, the night before from the sea, looked lovelier than from land. It was hot. There was scent of sulphur in the air. But I bought, in Naples, some charming cameos, to look at, not to wear, because on them were poignant little figures copied from the painted walls of Pompeii. The one I like best is of a dancing girl. I remember well her tomb.