LETTER FROM ISRAEL
509
introspection emanating from a sense of the pathos of space, of man's
precarious lodgement, the colorful and blood-heating day, the lyrical
evening and the night when the hiIIs withdraw in mist and man is
alone. It is a land for mystics. Three silver birches against the blue
Galilean sea and oddly one feels that there may be archetypal shapes
which are obscure symbols of God. The blend of the sensual and the
ascetic, the despot and the poet, the voluptuary and the saint,-the
dualism in the H ebrew character which one meets in the Bible and
today, is explicable here with the searing sun and the icy purity of
the Jordan, the charred grass and wild oleander, the scorched earth
and the horned lark, the turtle plopping in the pool.
After the savage day the contrite evening. The two elements seem
to permeate the Jewish character through history. In his greatest
depravity he recognizes sin. Evil fights with conscience and barbarism
suffers guilt. This almost feminine mterweaving can be seen to-day
in the police and customs officials who retain a saintly patience, some–
times lose their tempers, break into quarrels, and then, better nature
appealed to, apologize and acknowledge error. It may be that the
people returning from the world may start a world in microcosm, that
the wisdom of two thousand years may achieve a synthesis, a new
emphasis in living, that the culture preserved in vacuo for so long
may strike rich roots in the strange and familiar country. Meanwhile,
the little human experiments continue, although the constellations of
lights from the settlements on the hills are far apart and the singing
takes on that Eastern upward quaver, like a question.
