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Jose Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt Of The Masses

CHAPTER X: PRIMITIVISM AND HISTORY

             NATURE is always with us. It is self-supporting. In the forests of Nature we can be savages with impunity. We can likewise resolve never to cease being so, without further risk than the coming of other peoples who are not savages. But, in principle, it is possible to have peoples who are perennially primitive. Breyssig has called these "the peoples of perpetual dawn," those who have remained in a motionless, frozen twilight, which never progresses towards midday.  This is what happens in the world which is mere Nature. But it does not happen in the world of civilisation which is ours. Civilisation is not "just there," it is not self-supporting. It is artificial and requires the artist or the artisan. If you want to make use of the advantages of civilisation, but are not prepared to concern yourself with the upholding of civilisation- you are done. In a trice you find yourself left without civilisation. Just a slip, and when you look around everything has vanished into air. The primitive forest appears in its native state, just as if curtains covering pure Nature had been drawn back. The jungle is always primitive and, vice versa, everything primitive is mere jungle.  The romantics of every period have been excited by those scenes of violation, in which the natural and infrahuman assaults the white form of woman, and they have depicted Leda and the swan, Pasiphae and the bull, Antiope and the goat. Generalising the picture, they have found a more subtly indecent spectacle in the landscape with ruins, where the civilised, geometric stone is stifled beneath the embrace of wild vegetation. When your good romantic catches sight of a building, the first thing his eyes seek is the yellow hedge-mustard on cornice and roof. This proclaims, that in the long run, everything is earth, that the jungle springs up everywhere anew. It would be stupid to laugh at the romantic. The romantic also is in the right. Under these innocently perverse images there lies an immense, ever-present problem: that of the relations between civilisation and what lies behind it- Nature, between the rational and the cosmic. I reserve, then, the right to deal with this subject on another occasion and to be a romantic myself at an opportune moment.  But just now I am engaged in a contrary task. It is a question of keeping back the invading jungle. The "good European" must at present busy himself with something similar to what caused grave concern to the Australian states: how to prevent the prickly-pear from gaining ground and driving man into the sea.

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