Premium
A Personal Memoir —“How It Was”
Author(s) -
Philcox Sadie
Publication year - 1991
Publication title -
australian occupational therapy journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.595
H-Index - 44
eISSN - 1440-1630
pISSN - 0045-0766
DOI - 10.1111/j.1440-1630.1991.tb01721.x
Subject(s) - memoir , club , occupational therapy , citation , library science , history , gerontology , psychology , medicine , art history , computer science , psychiatry , anatomy
The works of Julio Caro Baroja are both voluminous and varied and it would be presumptious on the part of a disciple to take advantage of this occasion to offer however elogious an appraisal of them, and to do justice to them it would take much more space than I have any right to in such a volumen as this. But there is one, Los Baroja, his familial autobiography, which I feel I might legitimately take as the point of departure for a commentary whose only aim is, as it were, to sketch in an aspect of the background, Some of his readers were surpiised by it when it appeared for they had not suspected, despite the highly caustic personal asides to be found in even his most scholarly publications, that he would one^day offer them an analysis of himself not only sociological and historical, but introspective and frank. I was not surprised, for twenty years of his friendship had prepared me for it. During the long journeys together by road across the plateaux of Castile or the plains of Andalusia and France I had listened while I drove to the narratives which were to be incorporated within it later and I would like to think that I served, by my occasional comment or ques> tion, to draw out details in them. I was perhaps in this embryonic stage, the first «gentle reader» of the book. But there was another reason why my foreknowledge prepared me for it: Julio has always drawn a great deal, not only as a part of his ethnographical work, but for the pleasure of the visual record, and I had observed that among the caricatures which it amused him to draw as well (and which should indeed be regarded as an integral part of his oeuvre for they contain a wealth of observation and comment upon the scenes which he encountered) there was sometimes in the background a sad4ooking young bystander with a black moustache and a Basque beret, a witness to the pomp and follies that were depicted, in whom I could recognize the author himself. In somewhat the same spirit Jerome Bosch is believed to have placed his selfportrait, lugubrious and disenchanted,