Yes, yes—­how shall my reason not smile at these dilettantesque, would-be mystical, pseudo-philosophical interpretations, in which there is anything rather than patient study and—­shall I say scientific?—­objectivity and method?  And nevertheless ... eppur si muove!

Eppur si muove! And I take refuge in dilettantism, in what a pedant would call demi-mondaine philosophy, as a shelter against the pedantry of specialists, against the philosophy of the professional philosophers.  And who knows?...  Progress usually comes from the barbarian, and there is nothing more stagnant than the philosophy of the philosophers and the theology of the theologians.

Let them talk to us of Europe!  The civilization of Thibet is parallel with ours, and men who disappear like ourselves have lived and are living by it.  And over all civilizations there hovers the shadow of Ecclesiastes, with his admonition, “How dieth the wise man?—­as the fool” (ii. 16).

Among the people of my country there is an admirable reply to the customary interrogation, “How are you?"[59] and it is “Living.”  And that is the truth—­we are living, and living as much as all the rest.  What can a man ask for more?  And who does not recollect the verse?—­

Coda vez que considero que me tengo de morir, tiendo la capa en el suelo y no me harto de dormir.[60]

But no, not sleeping, but dreaming—­dreaming life, since life is a dream.

Among us Spaniards another phrase has very rapidly passed into current usage, the expression “It’s a question of passing the time,” or “killing the time.”  And, in fact, we make time in order to kill it.  But there is something that has always preoccupied us as much as or more than passing the time—­a formula which denotes an esthetical attitude—­and that is, gaining eternity, which is the formula of the religious attitude.  The truth is, we leap from the esthetic and the economic to the religious, passing over the logical and the ethical; we jump from art to religion.

One of our younger novelists, Ramon Perez de Ayala, in his recent novel, La Pata de la Raposa, has told us that the idea of death is the trap, and spirit the fox or the wary virtue with which to circumvent the ambushes set by fatality, and he continues:  “Caught in the trap, weak men and weak peoples lie prone on the ground ...; to robust spirits and strong peoples the rude shock of danger gives clear-sightedness; they quickly penetrate into the heart of the immeasurable beauty of life, and renouncing for ever their original hastiness and folly, emerge from the trap with muscles taut for action and with the soul’s vigour, power, and efficiency increased a hundredfold.”  But let us see; weak men ... weak peoples ... robust spirits ... strong peoples ... what does all this mean?  I do not know.  What I think I know is that some individuals and peoples have not yet really thought about death and immortality, have not felt them, and that others have ceased to think about them, or rather ceased to feel them.  And the fact that they have never passed through the religious period is not, I think, a matter for either men or peoples to boast about.