re: What’s the OT view of Charleston, SC?

This is from the Leopard.

The author is writing about the collapse of traditional society in Sicily and the rise of the new men. The rise of the hyenas and the jackals.

He’s writing about Sicily, but he could just as easily be describing the south.

Here the don is speaking with a reformer, explaining why Sicily has no desire to change.

quote:

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The Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfect, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they consider they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral. Do you really think, Chevalley, that you are the first who has hoped to canalize Sicily into the flow of universal history?

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He continues, remembering the visit of several British naval officers who watched Garibaldis forces landing from his veranda.

quote:

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They were ecstatic about the view, the light; they confessed, though, that they had been horrified at the squalor and filth of the streets around I didn’t explain to them that one thing was derived from the other, as I have tried to with you. Then one of them asked me what those Italian volunteers were really coming to do in Sicily. ‘They are coming to teach us good manners,’ I replied in English. ‘But they won’t succeed, because we think we are gods.’

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He concludes.

quote:

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Sicily wanted to sleep in spite of their invocations; for why should she listen to them if she herself is rich, if she’s wise, if she’s civilized, if she’s honest, if she’s admired and envied by all, in a word, she is perfect?

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