Marks Of Identity - pg. 133

Your efforts at reconstruction and synthesis had run up against a serious obstacle. Thanks to the documents and proofs stored away in the folders, you were able to dust off in your memory happenings and incidents that in the past you might have considered lost and which, once rescued from forgetfulness by these means, were able to shed light not only on your own biography, but also on certain obscure and revealing facets of life in Spain (the personal and the collective, the public and the private, joined together harmoniously both the inner search and the outside evidence, the intimate understanding of yourself and the growth of civic awareness in the Taifa kingdoms), but because of your voluntary exile in Paris and your vagabond existence in Europe, that previous communions had dissolved, and when you had been uprooted from your uninviting native soil (the cradle of heroes and conquistadores, saints and visionaries , madmen and inquisitors: the whole Iberian fauna), your own adventures and those of your country had taken divergent directions: you went one way, the bonds that had once linked you to your tribe having been broken, drunk and astonished at that new and incredible freedom of yours; along the other way, your country and that group of friends who were persevering in their noble efforts to change it, paying with their persons the cost that from indifference or cowardice you had refused to pay, coming to their maturity at the price of indispensable mistakes, they were adults, with the concise tampering that you did not have: the harsh experience of jail that you had never known; a strict awareness of the limits of the alienated dignity that you all had. With an empty memory after ten years of exile, how could you reconstruct that lost unity without doing it mischief?