Idols Behind Altars

Mexican mood the messiah is always accompanied by disaster: an earthquake, a conquest, a revolution, the sacrifice of a ruler; death and pain.

Ever recurrent in Mexican thought, is this concern with the sheer fact of life. Life shifting from one form to another, and all still the same; movement defined by stops; light endlessly becoming darkness, plants and people of necessity dying, at a definite fixed point, to be reborn.

the dust of Mexico on a human heart corrodes, precipitates. But with the dust of Mexico upon it, that heart can find no rest in any other land.

Most of the mountains are volcanoes, many of them are alive and occasionally stir in their sleep. Therefore they dominate in the making of that curious, insistent uncertainty that is the essence of Mexican life, bound up with the just as insistent sense of changelessness.