Explore "Youth and Egolatry" by Pio Baroja on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I am a Basque, if not on all four sides, at least on three and a half. The remaining half, which is not Basque, is Lombard.
Four of my eight family names are Guipuzcoan, two of them are Navarrese, one Alavese, and the other Italian. I take it that family names are indicative of the countries where one's ancestors lived, and I take it also that there is great potency behind them, that the influence of each works upon the individual with a duly proportioned intensity. Assuming this to be the case, the resultant of the ancestral influences operative upon me would indicate that my geographical parallel lies somewhere between the Alps and the Pyrenees. Sometimes I am inclined to think that the Alps and the Pyrenees are all that is European in Europe. Beyond them I seem to see Asia; below them, Africa.