The next day I had a letter from my landlord requesting me not to wake the concierge up again at two o’clock in the morning. And this is the country of liberty, the country where one is free to die, provided only the concierge is not awakened at two o’clock in the morning.
This little incident seems insignificant in itself, but to me it will be a very painful remembrance of one of the chief characteristics of the people of this country—a total lack of hospitality.
If our Oriental countries must one day become like these countries of the West, if they too must inherit all the vices, with which this civilisation is riddled through and through, then let them perish now.
If civilisation does not teach each individual the great and supreme quality of pity, then what use is it? What difference is there, please tell me, between the citizens of Paris and the carnivorous inhabitants of Darkest Africa? We Orientals imagine the word civilisation is a synonym of many qualities, and I, like others, believed it. Is it possible to be so primitive? Yet why should I be ashamed of believing in the goodness of human beings? Why should I blame myself, because these people have not come up to my expectations?
This musing reminds me of a story which our Koran Professor used to tell us. “There was once,” he said, “in a country of Asia Minor, a little girl who believed all she heard. One day she looked out of her window, and saw a chain of mountains blue in the distance.
“‘Is that really their colour?’ she asked her comrades.
“‘Yes,’ they answered.
“And so delighted was she with this information that she started out to get a nearer view of the blue mountains.
“Day after day she walked and walked, and at last got to the summit of the blue mountains, only to find grass just as she would have found it anywhere else. But she would not give up.
“‘Where are the blue mountains?’ she asked a shepherd, and he showed another chain higher and farther away, and on and on she went until she came to the mountains of Alti.