It may be said that the working people are more acquisitive and more possessive by instinct, than the other class. This may be true of many. But any individual of the lower class who has the dominant acquisitive instinct will automatically pass into the middle or upper class. The essential working man, like my father, for example, is far too vague to be really acquisitive. He will take sixpence, never thinking that he might have had a pound. And why· Because he wants the sixpence to go to the public-house, to be with the other men, in that queer physical contact which is the affinity of the blood, and is, in the long run, more deeply necessary to men than the affinity of the mind, but which, none the less, can be a prison either to man or woman who is confined to it. So that I myself could never go back into the working class, to the blindness, the obtuseness, the prejudice, the mass-emotions, But neither can I adapt myself to the middle-class, to sacrifice the old, deep blood-affinity between myself and my fellows.

Here, in Italy, my environment, my ambiente is formed by the peasants who work the podere. I am not intimate with them. hardly say anything to them beyond Good-day!—yet they are there, they are present for me, and I for them. If I had to live with them in their cottage, it would be a prison to me. And yet, if I had to choose between two evils, I should choose that, rather than to be imprisoned in the circle of the intelligentsia and the middle-class.

Because, it seems to me, one could have both affinities, the physical affinity with one’s fellow-men, and the mental or spiritual or “conscious” affinity. Yet you can’t have them equally. One or the other must pre-dominate. And the mental affinity, in its insistence on predominating, insists on the destruction and the sacrifice of the physical affinity. Even here in Italy, it is bad form to make gestures with your hands when you speak: and an Italian has to murder a good part of himself before he can suppress his gestures. But the middle class insists on it, and so it is done.

To enter the middle class, a man has to sacrifice something that is very deep and necessary to him, his natural physical affinity with other men and women. That is, if he’s got it. If he hasn’t got it, he is bastard middle-class already.

But it is the loss of the old, deep physical affinity between man and man, and man and woman, which causes the great gulf between the classes. And it is down this gulf that our civilisation will collapse: is already rapidly collapsing.