Here I must pause. I am not sensible of this identification of the sad with the disagreeable; and I will even say--although there may be some simple enough to take this to be a paradox--that for me the disagreeable is that which is called gay. I shall never forget the highly disagreeable effect, the deep disgust, which the strident hilarity of the Parisian boulevard produced upon me seventeen years ago, and the feeling of disquiet and uneasiness that came over me there. All that world of youth, dancing, jesting, playing, drinking, making love, seemed to me to be composed of puppets endowed with sense; they seemed to lack consciousness, to be appearances merely. I felt alone, utterly alone among them, and this feeling of loneliness pained me. I could not bring myself to accept the idea that these roisterers, these devotees of the _joie de vivre_, were beings like myself, my fellows, or even the idea that they were living creatures dowered with consciousness. Here you have an instance of the way in which gaiety jarred upon me, was disagreeable to me. And on the other hand, when I am in the midst of heart-sick multitudes crying to heaven for mercy, chanting a _De profundis_ or a _Miserere_, I cannot help feeling myself among brothers, united to them by love. Later on, Baroja says: “For me, one of the saddest things about Spain is that we Spaniards cannot be frivolous or jovial.” And for me it would be one of the saddest things for Spain if we Spaniards could become frivolous and jovial. In that case we should cease to be Spaniards, yet without even becoming Europeans. In that case we should have to renounce our true consolation and our true glory, which consists precisely in this inability to be either frivolous or jovial. In that case we might be able to repeat in chorus all the unsubstantialities of the popular scientific handbooks, but we should be incapacitated for entering into the kingdom of wisdom. In that case we might perhaps have better and finer wines, purer oil, better oysters; but we should have to renounce the possibility of a new _Don Quixote_, or a new Velazquez, and, above all, the possibility of a new St. John of the Cross, a new Fray Diego de Estella, a new St. Teresa de Jesús--whether orthodox or heterodox, it matters not which. And Baroja concludes: “A sad country in which everywhere all people live their lives thinking of nothing less than of life.” And this arbitrariness provokes my arbitrariness and I exclaim: Unhappy those modern European countries in which people live their lives thinking of nothing more than of life. Unhappy those countries in which men do not continually think of death and in which the guiding principle of life is not the thought that we shall all one day have to lose it. * * * * *