The other day I began to read  "Unfinished Business," a memoir by the actor and writer John Houseman.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

"I was conceived in the second year of this century and legitimized five years after that. By then I was speaking English with my mother, French with my father and his friends, Rumanian with the household and German with a visiting governess. Two of my first four birthdays wre celebrated on board the Orient Express between Paris and Bucharest, the city where I was born on 22 September 1902 of a Jewish-Alsation father and a British mother of Welsh-Irish descent.

He first saw her in the Bois de Boulogne riding a bicycle and wearing a bright red blouse with black polka dots. A month later they were living together at Maisons-Lafitte near the race track. Six months after that, when he was sent off to manage his family's grain ahd shipping interests in the Balkans, she accompanied him to the shores of the Black Sea, where they occupied a large brick house on a hill overlooking the Danube.

Till I was four and a half my hair fell in long golden curls over my shoulders: the day it was cut off I was photographed twice -- before and after. That same year my father's family business collapsed as the result of a great-uncle's disastrous investment in the Marseilles streetcar system. As a result he was able to marry my gentile mother and I was registered at the French consulate under the name of Jacques Haussmann. Returning to Paris, he set up in business for himself as a broker and operator in commodities. He was a gambler; for the remaining ten years of his life he rode a series of speeding roller coasters (wheat, cotton, sugar, cocoa, cofee and various sorts of vegetable oils) up and down the 'futures' markets of the world. They carried him from month to month, and sometimes from week to week, from riches to ruin and back again."

I was put immediately in mind of Humbert Humbert: 

 "I was born in 1910, in Paris, a salad of racial genes, of mixed French and Austrian descent, with a dash of the Danube in my veins. My very photogenic mother (picnic, lightning) died when I was three...."

But I was also put in mind of more than a sentence, however memorable, in a book.  I thought of  Europe Before The Great War,  and then of that diminished entre-deux-guerres Europe after that war and before the Second World War, and then, of the still more diminished Europe, stripped of its possessions abroad,  which is now again in a pre-war period of sorts, a drole de guerre that is likely to be lost and won not on any battlefield or Field of A Cloth of Gold (though gold -- in the form of OPEC revenues --  is certainly playing its part). This wa, this Jihad, is being conducted, steadily and insidiously, through means other than that of open warfare. I wonder if the indigenous peoples of Europe, after the self-inflicted wounds of the quite-unnecessary Great War, and after the self-inflicted wounds of the quite necessary World War II, might at long last come to their senses, and exhibit powers of recuperation and resistance that will depend on the level of  intelligent gratitude for the civilisational legacy which they have inherited and hold in trust (with life estates, not fee simples), and so have no right, whether out of fecklessness or fear, to hand over  that legacy into the destructive hands of primitives, animated by a cruel and barbarous faith that reduces men to mental slavery.

Fortunately, there's still time. Just.