Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) Read Online Free Page A

time or space for consultation. Invocatory magic is the men’s field. That means calling the Goddess to witness and sponsor some magical action.’
    ‘As a poet invokes the Muse?’
    ‘Is your Muse a living woman?’
    ‘I think of her as the woman with whom I’m in love as I write.’
    ‘Is that usual in your epoch?’
    ‘I don’t think so. But it’s my way, at any rate.’
    ‘I’m glad; that will help you to understand us better. Custom here is based not on a code of laws, but for the most part on the inspired utterances of poets; that is to say, it’s dictated by the Muse, who is the Goddess.’
    At this point Starfish caught Sally’s eye and began rolling cigarettes. He rolled six neatly and rapidly, using some sort of leaf instead of paper. He handed one to each of us, except the Interpreter, and kept the last for himself.
    ‘So you still smoke?’ I said.
    ‘Every evening at about this time,’ said Fig-bread. Sapphire rose, lighted each cigarette with a wooden spill and spoke what seemed a traditional formula: ‘Smoke, enjoy, be silent!’ The Interpreter bowed slightly, took a meerschaum pipe from his pocket, and went out to smoke on the porch. Afterwards I found out that each estate used a different type of tobacco and kept strictly to itself while smoking or, in the servants’ estate, chewing. ‘Smokes do not mix,’ was a proverb I was to hear many times in different contexts during my stay. There was no careless, nervous tobacco-taking at odd hours. Everyone smoked, or chewed, calmly and deliberately, once a day only. Before I had been there a day I got tobacco-hunger and used to long for the evening.
    When we had finished, the cigarette ends were burned in the fire and Sapphire said: ‘Now we may speak!’
    See-a-Bird had apparently been considering what I had told him earlier in the evening about the population of London.
    ‘How terrible it must be to live there,’ he said, ‘with some ten million people occupying territory that here would support only five or ten thousand! Whenever you leave your house to visit a friend in another part of the town, you must pass hundreds of new people.’
    ‘What’s so terrible about that?’
    ‘Well, surely, whenever you see a new face in the street, even if no greeting is exchanged there is always a sort of contact, a recognition: you not only notice the face but you sum it up mentally and store it in your memory. Every personal contact is an expense of mental energy. Here we know practically everyone by sight, so our casual meetings make little demand on our energies, and on grand festival days we dull our sensibilities with drink. But we find visits to other regions exhausting; the brain dizzies after a time from the demands put upon it. That’s why we travel little, and why, when we go abroad, our hosts take care to expose us to as few personal contacts as possible. When I try to imagine thousands and thousands of people all in different clothes and with thoroughly disorganized minds, threading in and out of one another’s lives without knowing or greeting, each pursuing a private, competitive path – I think it would kill me.’
    ‘Oh, no. One can get used to almost everything. The Eskimos who were brought to London in the eighteenth century didn’t die of seeing too many faces. So far as I remember, they just caught bad colds and died that way.’
    ‘Nobody dies of a cold,’ Sally insisted. ‘Seeing too many faces must have undermined their strength.’
    ‘Have it your own way. At any rate, we treat people as if they were trees: when you’re walking through a forest, you don’t study every tree, but only the striking ones that will serve as landmarks to guide you back. In the same way we don’t study people’s faces as they go by. Old friends, relatives, even lovers may pass each other and not know it. We’re conscious only of the policeman who regulates traffic, and of the ticket-collector in the bus or railway station. But unless