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it is a matter of so many cigarettes.
    7.30.37
    It is important, when writing about the peasants, not to falsify them with sentimental humor. It is very much the fashion to represent them as comic and quaint abstractions attached to picturesque names like Paul and Socrates and Aristotle. The fact that they dress oddly seems to drive city-bred writers into a frenzy of romantic admiration. But really the average Balkan peasant is quite commonplace, as venal, cunning, or admirable, as a provincial townsman. And the sentiment which attaches to the pastoral life of these picturesque communities (which treasure amulets against the devil and believe in a patron saint), has been very much overdone. Anthropologists are only just beginning to visit the suburbs of our greater cities with their apparatus. Their findings should establish a greater sense of connection between the peasant and the townsman.
    8.3.37
    Theodore has one particular friend who is a so-called lunatic. He sits with the others most of the time under the trees outside the whitewashed asylum building, looking at his own fingers; but at times an abrupt desire to talk seizes him, and when it does he unerringly selects for audience the so-called sane who pass along the dusty white road outside the railings. His name is Basil and he has yellow dilated eyes and a deep voice. Theodore often pauses on his way out of town to greet him, rattling his stick against the railings to draw his attention, and shifting the great green bag of tree spore and seed which he carries about him on his walks. The lunatic sticks his head through the bars and smiles artfully. He says:
    “They say I am mad.”
    “Yes,” says Theodore gravely.
    “And here I am.”
    “Yes,” says Theodore.
    “I am fed and clothed and do not have to work.”
    “Yes.”
    “Well—am I mad, or are the people outside mad?”
    This is in the purest vein of Ionian logic and is to be commended to students of sociology. Basil’s dossier lists him as a melancholic. A novice in a nearby monastery he early showed a gift for casuistry—that melancholy science. But he dips his fingers into Theodore’s little paper bag of sweets with a transfiguring smile ofhappiness before he goes back to his place on the garden bench among the others.
    8.6.37
    “If you had an opportunity to put a question to Socrates what would it be?” writes Zarian. “I would ask him if he was a happy man. I am sure that greater wisdom imposes a greater strain upon a man.” At the “Partridge” this view is contested bitterly by Peltours and N. Wisdom, they say, teaches the ratiocinative faculty how to rest, to attain a deeper surrender of the whole self to the flux of time and space. Theodore recalls Socrates’ epileptic fits while I find myself thinking of a line from Donne prefixed to “Coryat’s Crudities”: “When wilt thou be at full, Great Lunatique?”
    8.7.37
    Fishing demands the philosophic attitude. We have been waiting a week for propitious nights to use the carbide lamp and the tridents and at last the wish has been granted: deep still water and a waning moon which will not rise until late.
    After dinner I hear the low whistle of the man by the sea and I go out on to the balcony. He is shipping his basket and tridents and screwing his carbide-lamp to the prow. Tonight I am to try my hand at this peculiar mode of fishing. The tridents are four in number and varying in size; besides them we ship theoctopus hook—attached to a staff about the size of a billiard cue—for octopus is not stabbed direct but coaxed: whereas squid and fish are victims of a direct attack.
    Small adjustments are made. He removes his coat which smells of glue and wood shavings and bales some of the water out from under the floorboards. Then we cast off and move slowly out into the darkness. The night is deep and clean smelling and utterly silent. Far out under the Albanian hills glow the little flares of other carbide fishers. Anastasius circles in