I just found this quotation from Mircea Eliade. This is probably from his semi-fascist early phase but still it is good.
“Until recently there persisted among Europeans the obscure awareness of a mystic solidarity with the land of one’s birth. It was not a commonplace love of
country or province; it was not admiration of ancestors buried, generation after generation, around the village church. It was something entirely different: the
mystic experience of autochthony, of being indigenous, the profound sense of
having emerged from the local ground, the sense that the earth had given birth to us, much as it had given birth, in its inexhaustible fertility, to rocks and stream and flowers…”
Since I am half Irish four or five generations back I should not feel this for England - nor can one feel this mystical love for Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex - and anyway I have lived in
Romania for a decade and a half, but of course I do understand.
It puts me in mind of Lord Macaulay's one great poem, the Jacobite's Epitaph, though the sentiments are not mine even after fifteen years of self-imposed exile.
Gray-hair'd with sorrow in my manhood's prime; Till God, who saw me tried too sorely, gave By that dear language which I spake like thee, |
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