"To Morano!" they tell me. "It is nearer the mountain, and there you
will find mules plentiful as blackberries. To Morano!"
Morano lies a few miles higher up the valley on the great military road
to Lagonegro, which was built by Murat and cuts through the interior of
Basilicata, rising at Campo Tenese to a height of noo metres. They are
now running a public motor service along this beautiful stretch of 52
kilometres, at the cheap rate of a sou per kilometre.
En route!
POSTSCRIPT. - Another symptom of the south:
Once you have reached the latitude of Naples, the word grazie (thank
you) vanishes from the vocabulary of all save the most cultured. But to
conclude therefrom that one is among a thankless race is not altogether
the right inference. They have a wholly different conception of the
affair. Our septentrional "thanks" is a complicated product in which
gratefulness for things received and for things to come are
unconsciously balanced; while their point of view differs in nothing
from that of the beau-ideal of Greek courtesy, of Achilles, whose mother
procured for him a suit of divine armour from Hephaistos, which he
received without a word of acknowledgment either for her or for the god
who had been put to some little trouble in the matter. A thing given
they regard as a thing found, a hermaion, a happy hit in the lottery of
life; the giver is the blind instrument of Fortune. This chill attitude
repels us; and our effusive expressions of thankfulness astonish these
people and the Orientals.
A further difference is that the actual gift is viewed quite
extrinsically, intellectually, either in regard to what it would fetch
if bartered or sold, or, if to be kept, as to how far its possession may
raise the recipient in the eyes of other men. This is purely Homeric,
once more - Homeric or primordial, if you prefer. Odysseus told his kind
host Alkinoos, whom he was never to see again, that he would be glad to
receive farewell presents from him - to cherish as a friendly memory?
No, but "because they would make him look a finer fellow when he got
home." The idea of a keepsake, of an emotional value attaching to some
trifle, is a northern one. Here life is give and take, and lucky he who
takes more than he gives; it is what Professor Mahaffy calls the
"ingrained selfishness of the Greek character." Speaking of all below
the upper classes, I should say that disinterested benevolence is apt to
surpass their comprehension, a good-natured person being regarded as
weak in the head.
Has this man, then, no family, that he should benefit strangers? Or is
he one of nature's unfortunates - soft-witted?
