LIVING IN ITALY
77
resting at the end of the day in his hotel room, with insolent or
jealous thoughts.
A man may exile himself for isolation-Santayana in his con–
vent in Rome- for the freedom of solitude, the purity of the re–
lease from useless obligations and conventions; or he may exile
him–
self, from America at least, for the freedom of hospitality, the en–
largement of possibilities. You may be a hermit or an inn-keeper.
Berenson's nature destined him to be an inn-keeper. Whether he
loved humanity or not, he had an enormous appetite for meeting
it, being visited by it, for serving it lunch and tea. He seemed help–
less before the appeal of a new person, a soul who carried either an
accidental or earned distinction. No one was easier to see than
Berenson. He could not be called a snob, although his appetite em–
braced the merely social and the merely rich. When we mailed a
letter of introduction to him, he accepted it as a bizarre formality
because, of course, he who saw everyone was willing and happy to
see yet another. One was never tempted to think it was ennui or
triviality that produced this state of addiction; the absorbing in–
clination seemed to be a simple fear of missing someone, almost as
if these countless visitors and travelers had a secret the exile piti–
fully wished to discover. The expatriate sometimes suffers pain–
fully from the dread of losing touch with the world he has left but
towards which he looks back with longings and significant emo–
tions, with guilt and resentment, with all the tart ambivalence of
the injured lover. It is, after all, the fickle, abandoned country for
which the exile writes his books, for which his possessions are ul–
timately designated; money and citizenship, nieces and nephews,
language and memory-the very skin of life-remain in their old
place.
As the years pass, the feelings of loss and uncertainty appear
to grow stronger not weaker for those who live abroad. The traveler
from home is important, the visitor, the acquaintance passing
through bring knowledge, prejudices, fashions that cannot be ac–
quired from the newspapers. A feeling of guilt persists about the
very beauty of life abroad, the greater ease, and above all the para–
sitism of the exile's condition. The dream-like timelessness of Italy
