This has been the Italian position ever since. The mind, that is the
Light; the senses, they are the Darkness. Aphrodite, the queen of the
senses, she, born of the sea-foam, is the luminousness of the gleaming
senses, the phosphorescence of the sea, the senses become a conscious
aim unto themselves; she is the gleaming darkness, she is the luminous
night, she is goddess of destruction, her white, cold fire consumes and
does not create.

This is the soul of the Italian since the Renaissance. In the sunshine
he basks asleep, gathering up a vintage into his veins which in the
night-time he will distil into ecstatic sensual delight, the intense,
white-cold ecstasy of darkness and moonlight, the raucous, cat-like,
destructive enjoyment, the senses conscious and crying out in their
consciousness in the pangs of the enjoyment, which has consumed the
southern nation, perhaps all the Latin races, since the Renaissance.

It is a lapse back, back to the original position, the Mosaic position,
of the divinity of the flesh, and the absoluteness of its laws. But also
there is the Aphrodite-worship. The flesh, the senses, are now
self-conscious. They know their aim. Their aim is in supreme sensation.
They seek the maximum of sensation. They seek the reduction of the
flesh, the flesh reacting upon itself, to a crisis, an ecstasy, a
phosphorescent transfiguration in ecstasy.

The mind, all the time, subserves the senses. As in a cat, there is
subtlety and beauty and the dignity of the darkness. But the fire is
cold, as in the eyes of a cat, it is a green fire. It is fluid,
electric. At its maximum it is the white ecstasy of phosphorescence, in
the darkness, always amid the darkness, as under the black fur of a cat.
Like the feline fire, it is destructive, always consuming and reducing