The Right to Sanity [antikvár]

'MY DEAR DIARY""Another damned thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?"Duke of Gloucester (1781)Compte-Rendu, in the guise of a "Letter to ttie Editor"De/ear Nick, would you like to volunteer to become my "Dear Diary" and keep under lock and key my confessions and never to publish them? Though I feel you may w^ant to do so, making light of my unease. Since I never ever intended to keep a Diary: the very thought makes me feel self-conscious. Because that was exactly what you asked me to do - to write at length about my arrival to these shores and settling down and fitting in - in the British Isles. What can I say in less than half-a-million words? What, so that it should not sound to English ears as dead-pan flattery - outpourings of my gratitude for having been accepted, granted asylum in Feb. 1957 and, five years later, citizenship?When Gabriele D'Annunzio wrote about France, "everyone has two homelands, one his own and one - la France", holds good of England too. Yet there is a difference. Marianne (France) takes it for granted that all and sundry owes Her admiration, adoration, transport at the sight of her beauty: tributes to be given, prostrated, to which She nonchalantly turns her back - frowning to the sale méteque who speaks broken French and waters Her wines in the wrong way. But Britannia is delighted on hearing your thick accent, your mistakes and malapropisms, and even if you implore Her to be stopped and corrected. She hugs you and beams at you with a radiant smile, "Me, correct your mistakes or your accent? I wouldn't dream of it! It is charming!"Feeling welcome, feeling at ease and at home at once: that makes all the difference But Dear Diary, aren't you a bit late with your Questionnaire? For I have spent half of my adult life in this country and by now I have become a kind of a freak, a mongrel: nowadays I manage to find my bearings in this troubled world of ours as an Englishman (a titre d'honneur). My outlook, my taste in literature, in music, in philosophy is English; my affinity to David Hume, to