Europe

 
 Greece: The echoes are even more complex and distant. Some of it (the Byzantine) because it's "off the beaten track" of Western European cultural development and thus foreign, in part because its center (Constantinople) no longer exists at all; some of it (ancient Greek) because it's just very far back and has been layered over with so many strata of foreign domination etc. The echoes are shadowlike, intangible. Brittle and easily hurt by modernization or tourism.

Norway: Echo of heathen beliefs... which were strong in the countryside for long. Echo of the Vikings.

India: Vast continuity... (but something (in form) somewhat like Italy)...
  
« Echoes of High Culture »         
   
 
France: High culture is close in time - a present, living memory - receding, but not fast or far as yet.
Italy: High culture is distant (Renaissance). Present, but fallen off. It "echoes" but in modern national culture it is less explicit. A kind of revitalization takes place, but a lot of this is on the basis of more modern, peasant variants of the old culture. This results in a strange mix of "high" and "peasant" components in present-day consciousness. Leonardo echoes in plastic madonnas. (Italians are freed from their culture when they come to America.) Venice is a city, but in a sense more like an abandoned lot (note that a specific kind of urban area here has that quality - where else today does one find this? Venice is not a museum, but a shrine.) Further back, more complex and indirect and inscrutable, is the echo of Rome: Villages are like cities. Even the most peasant-like culture is sophisticated.