Then, one night in New York, in a little moving-picture theatre on a cheap side street, one night of winter, when the snow outside was deeply white, just as it used to be by black forest edges, in those long forgotten Michigan winters, I saw laughing down upon me from the silver screen, in a luxurious Roman garden-scene from Quo Vadis, a face I seemed to have known. What dimly remembered delight was there! In the eyes, mouth, the careless gesture of the head, the trained grace of hands! It was the face of a man no longer in his first youth, but keeping still youth’s slenderness, youth’s lines. A face more eloquent, made more impassioned and moving by the years, and crowned with the flowers I always loved, the fragile flowers of an Italian spring. The background was an old, rich garden of the south, and beyond—the Immortal City, Rome. Into the eyes as they looked upon me crept a look I seemed to remember. Salvini!
The years rolled back. I was sixteen again. I was mounting my mustang under swaying trees, in a windy dawn of early autumn. Shining and resplendent was the outspread circle of the plains, and beside me, moving along at speed, over the gold-hued grasses of dying summer, a youth I liked, with the face of Italy; a dark impassioned face; eloquent; and a voice speaking in my ear, with luscious, singing phrase I never forgot. The young Salvini!
There is only one other thing I remember with equal delight, equal vividness. It is night. And likewise a night of long ago. It is near a Latin land, by the Mexican Gulf; a sultry night of summer; a silent, outspread, sullen water, with faint, far stars winking down into it, and the white gleam, and the drunken, too heavy scent of magnolia blossoms. These two memories sway my senses.
Now I know that the reason is because they keep securely the same emotional height.
I have found something in a French writer I like: Only Cezanne knew the color of Provençe. I have been fluttering, mentally, long, around that idea, searching for it, trying to seize it like a bird its nest, at night.
Why was Margaret of Navarre the helpless sport of fate and accident? Whenever I re-read The Heptameron I wonder more. She had beauty, youth, health, intelligence above the ordinary, something that resembled the gift of genius, and in her old French world none were more highly placed. She was born and lived beside a throne. Yet she had no power of direction over days. She was as helpless on the current of years as driftwood. What was lacking? Was it the saving grain of salt of the commonplace? Or are human beings sport of deep tides of time, and the so-called lucky ones, who get what they want the way they want it, grow conceited, and cry out like the little fat boy in Mother Goose: See what a plum I found! The fact is, they had nothing to do with it.
A delusion is not a bad thing to grow. It is superior to reality because it is out of range of attack and can not wear out. It transcends time and accelerates action.
When one is young one wants happiness to last. When one grows old one finds it was made to taste of, never to keep. Happiness is merely the wholesale price of wisdom.
The mind that is perfectly clear, if such a thing were conceivable, would not be the mind to succeed. A certain amount of prejudice (little wrongs for alloy with pure gold) is necessary. It guides.
To one deprived of it, whose crystal-clear, dispassionate intelligence sees all sides at once, whose brain is weakened in its progress toward choice by weighing infinitesimal differences, selections, resolute action, would not be easy. We keep many unpaid debts to wrong. That is where right gets its crown. As brevity is the soul of wit, delusion is the fiber of life.