earth in his grip, bound it up with railways, burrowed it with iron
fingers, subdued it. He wanted this last triumph of the ego, this last
reduction. He wanted to go where the English have gone, beyond the Self,
into the great inhuman Not Self, to create the great unliving creators,
the machines, out of the active forces of nature that existed
before flesh.

But he is too old. It remains for the young Italian to embrace his
mistress, the machine.

I sat on the roof of the lemon-house, with the lake below and the snowy
mountain opposite, and looked at the ruins on the old, olive-fuming
shores, at all the peace of the ancient world still covered in sunshine,
and the past seemed to me so lovely that one must look towards it,
backwards, only backwards, where there is peace and beauty and no more
dissonance.

I thought of England, the great mass of London, and the black, fuming,
laborious Midlands and north-country. It seemed horrible. And yet, it
was better than the padrone, this old, monkey-like cunning of fatality.
It is better to go forward into error than to stay fixed inextricably
in the past.

Yet what should become of the world? There was London and the industrial
counties spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the
end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine,
it was intolerable. For away, beyond, beyond all the snowy Alps, with
the iridescence of eternal ice above them, was this England, black and
foul and dry, with her soul worn down, almost worn away. And England was
conquering the world with her machines and her horrible destruction of