“You are right. The Spanish people likes violent spectacles, which beget the emotion of tragedy, or rather of ferocity. I had no difficulty in understanding this at the bull-fight last Sunday. I understood it also when I conversed with various people, and in particular with literary people, who tear one another to pieces with unparalleled ferocity. Poor Christ, pierced and bathed with blood! There is no hope that His wounds will ever heal in these Spanish cathedrals or that the grimace of His frenzied pain will ever relax--for here there is no knowledge of the return of Jesus to heaven, after His martyrdom.” Perhaps--who knows?--our heaven is martyrdom itself. Not a few foreigners who have learnt to know us have been struck with this ferocity with which, here in Spain, men of letters destroy one another. Yes, here all men, but particularly artists and writers, destroy one another with the ferocity of bull-fighters--or it may be with the Christian ferocity of our Tangerine Christianity. And I, who do not like bull-fights and never go to see them, I, who do not like flaying my fellow writers (for the office of executioner dirties the hands), I like these Tangerine Christs, purple, livid, blood-stained and blood-drained. Yes, I like these bleeding and exsanguious Christs. And the smell of tragedy! Above all, the smell of tragedy! * * * * * You should read the great Sarmiento’s comparison between bull-fights and tragedy, in his account of his journey in Spain about the middle of the last century. In the bull-fight there is none of the insupportable unities of the pseudo-classical tragedy, and there is, moreover, real dying. Real dying, and, above all, real killing. The bull is killed just as an infidel dog was killed by a good Spanish Christian in the good old days--really killed. For many people, perhaps for my friend the American, all this creates an atmosphere difficult to breathe, an acrid atmosphere. But if you take away the taste, other atmospheres too become insipid. It is like the austere beauty of our bleak upland deserts. He who tempers his soul, or distempers it--I know not which--in the contemplation of these blood-stained and blood-drained Christs, never accustoms himself afterwards to others. And this hate, this same hate that circulates everywhere here, like a subterranean stream of lava, this same hate ... It has its source in what is deepest in ourselves; we hate ourselves and not one another only, but each one his own self. “But you people have no real love of life, although you are tenacious of it,” another foreigner said to me once, a Frenchman, as one who makes a discovery. And I replied: “Perhaps!” He exclaimed again: “But this is a veritable cult of death!” And I answered: “Of death, no--of immortality!” The fear that if we die, we die utterly and altogether, makes us cling to life, and the hope of living another life makes us hate this one.