xtbooks on the theory of law, the life and opinions
of Don Francisco. In the moments when the sun shone the heat made the
sticky cistus bushes with the glistening white flowers all about me
reek with pungence. Then a cool whisp of wind would bring a chill of
snow-slopes from the mountains and a passionless indefinite fragrance
of distances. At intervals a church bell would toll in a peevish
importunate manner from the boxlike convent on the hill opposite. I was
reading an account of the philosophical concept of monism, cudgelling
my brain with phrases. And his fervent love of nature made the master
evoke occasionally in class this beautiful image of the great poet and
philosopher Schelling: "Man is the eye with which the spirit of nature
contemplates itself"; and then having qualified with a phrase
Schelling's expression, he would turn on those who see in nature
manifestation of the rough, the gross, the instinctive, and offer for
meditation this saying of Michelet: "Cloth woven by a weaver is just as
natural as that a spider weaves. All is in one Being, all is in the
Idea and for the Idea, the latter being understood in the way Platonic
substantialism has been interpreted...."

In the grass under my book were bright fronds of moss, among which very
small red ants performed prodigies of mountaineering, while along
tramped tunnels long black ants scuttled darkly, glinting when the
light struck them. The smell of cistus was intense, hot, full of spices
as the narrow streets of an oriental town at night. In the distance the
mountains piled up in zones olive green, Prussian blue, ultra-marine,
white. A cold wind-gust turned the pages of the book. Thought and
passion, reflection and instinct, affections, emotions, impulses
collaborate in the rule of custom, which is revealed not in words
declared and promulgated in view of future conduct, but in the act
itself, tacit, taken for granted, or, according to the energetic
expression of the Digest: _rebus et factis_. Over "factis," sat a
little green and purple fly with the body curved under at the table. I
wondered vaguely if it was a Mayfly. And then all of a sudden it was
clear to me that these books, these dusty philosophical phrases, these
mortuary articles by official personages were dimming the legend in my
mind, taking the brilliance out of the indirect but extraordinarily
personal impact of the man himself. They embalmed the Cid and set him
up in the church with his sword