And in this critical century Don Quixote, who has contaminated himself with criticism also, has to attack his own self, the victim of intellectualism and sentimentalism, and it is when he wishes to be most spontaneous that he appears most affected. And the poor fellow wishes to rationalize the irrational and irrationalize the rational. And he sinks into the inner despair of the critical century whose two greatest victims were Nietzsche and Tolstoi. And through despair he attains the heroic fury of which Giordano Bruno spoke—that Don Quixote of the mind who escaped from the cloister—and he becomes an awakener of sleeping souls (dormitantium animorum excubitor), as the ex-Dominican said of himself. “Heroic love,” Bruno wrote, “is the property of those superior natures called insane [insano]—not because they do not know [non sanno], but because they over-know [soprasanno].”
But Bruno believed in the triumph of his doctrines—at any rate they have stated on the inscription at the foot of his statue in the Campo dei Fiori, opposite the Vatican, that it is dedicated to him by the age which he foretold (il secole da lui divinato). But our Don Quixote, the Don Quixote who has risen from the dead, the inward Don Quixote, the Don Quixote who is conscious of his own comicness, does not believe that his doctrines will triumph in this world, because they are not of it. And it is better that they should not triumph. And if the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would retire to the mountain, fleeing from the king-making and king-killing crowds, as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim Him king. He left the title of king to be written upon the cross.
What, then, is the new mission of Don Quixote in the world of to-day? To cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But the wilderness hears, though men do not hear, and one day it will be transformed into a sounding forest, and this solitary voice that falls upon the wilderness like seed, will yield a gigantic cedar, which with its hundred thousand tongues will sing an eternal hosanna to the Lord of life and of death.
I regret that I have not by me a certain essay dealing with this subject by Guglielmo Ferrero. I read it in some review the name of which I have forgotten, but I preserve a clear recollection of it, for it interested me greatly. Ferrero treated the subject from the historical and sociological point of view, and I, who am neither an historian nor a sociologist, intend to treat it, as is my custom, from the point of view of purely personal opinion and individual impression. (This is my custom, and yet in spite of the fact I cannot prevent people from insisting on calling me a savant and talking about my theories. I have no theories. I have only impressions and sensations.)
But, since I am unable to put some quotation from Ferrero at the head of this essay—this habit of basing our assertions upon authority is the conventional way of giving them a deceptive air of objectivity—I will head it by a sentence from George Meredith, that extremely subtle English novelist. In “The Egoist” it is stated that Willoughby “abandoned London as the burial-place of the individual man.”
I, to-day, am one with Willoughby in believing that great cities de-individualize, or rather de-personalize, us. This may perhaps be due to the fact that, though not an egoist like the hero of Meredith’s novel, I still remain, according to Ramiro de Maeztu, an incorrigible egotist.
Great cities are levelling; they lift up the low and depress the high; they exalt mediocrity and abase superlativeness—the result of the action of the mass, as powerful in social life as in chemistry.
Soon after I came to this ancient city of Salamanca which has now become so dear to me, a city of some thirty thousand souls, I wrote to a friend and told him that if after two years’ residence here he should be informed that I spent my time playing cards, taking siestas and strolling round the square for a couple of hours every day, he might give me up for lost; but if at the end of that time I should still be studying, meditating, writing, battling for culture in the public arena, he might take it that I was better off here than in Madrid. And so it has proved to be.
I remember that Guglielmo Ferrero’s conclusion, based upon a review of ancient Greece, of the Italy of the Renaissance and of the Germany of a century ago, is that for the life of the spirit, small cities of a population like that of Salamanca are the best—better than very small towns or large ones of over a hundred thousand inhabitants.
This depends, of course, upon the quality of the spirit in question. I am convinced that the monastic cloister, which so often atrophies the soul and reduces the average intelligence to a lamentable slavery to routine, has in certain exceptional cases exalted the spirit by its arduous discipline.
Great cities are essentially democratic, and I must confess that I feel an invincible platonic mistrust of democracies. In great cities culture is diffused but vulgarized. People abandon the quiet reading ofbooks to go to the theatre, that school of vulgarity; they feel the need of being together; the gregarious instinct enslaves them; they must be seeing one another.
I think it was Taine who observed that the majority of French geniuses were either themselves country-born or the sons of country-born parents. And I assure you that I should find it difficult to believe in the genius of a Parisian born of Parisians.
Guerra Junqueiro once said to me: “You are fortunate in living in a city in which you can walk along the streets dreaming, without fear of people disturbing your dream!” And certainly in Madrid it is impossible to walk along the streets dreaming, not so much for fear of motors, trams and carriages as because of the continual stream of unknown faces. The distraction of a great city, so agreeable to those who must have something, no matter what, to occupy their imagination, is necessarily vexatious to those whose chief concern is not to have their imagination diverted. Personally I find nothing more monotonous than a Paris boulevard. The people seem to me like shadows. I cannot endure a crowd of unknown faces.
I am afraid of Madrid. That is to say, I am afraid of myself when I go there. It is easy to say that in great cities everyone can live the life that suits him best, but it is easier to say it than to do it. When I am in the capital, I return home every night regretting having gone to the party or to the meeting that I went to and resolving never to go again, but only to break my vow the very next day. I am surrounded, hemmed in and invaded by a lethal atmosphere of compliance,an atmosphere that is generated by this so-called life of society.
I have always felt an aversion from this so-called life of society, which has for its object the cultivation of social relationships. Is there anything more terrible than a “call”? It affords an occasion for the exchange of the most threadbare commonplaces. Calls and the theatre are the two great centres for the propagation of platitudes.
A man of society, a drawing-room man who can make himself agreeable to women when he pays a call, is always a man whose principal concern is to suppress any arresting spontaneity, not to let his own personality show through. For it is a man’s own personality that people find irritating. People like to meet the average man, the normal man, the man who has nothing exceptional about him. The exception is always irritating. How many times I have heard the terrible phrase: “This man irritates me.” Yes, it is “the man” that irritates, and the hardest fight for the man who feels that he is a man is the fight to win respect for his own individuality.
And in a small town? Its stage is very restricted; the players soon tire of playing the parts allotted to them and the real men begin to appear underneath, with all their weaknesses—that is to say, with precisely that which makes them men. I have a great liking for provincial life, for there it is easiest to discern tragedy lurking beneath an appearance of calm. And just as much as I abhor comedy, I love tragedy. And, above all, tragi-comedy.
I have heard it said that there are no such seething intestine rancours and dissensions as in a merchant vessel or a monastery; that whenever men are obliged to live together, cut off from the rest of the world, their personalities, their most real and intimate selves, immediately clash against one another. And I dare say that this is the only way of attaining that knowledge of ourselves which ought to be our chief aim. It seems to me scarcely possible that a man should get to know himself by shutting himself up in the wilderness, contemplating—what? The best way of knowing one’s self is to clash, heart against heart, that is to say, rock against rock, with one’s fellow.
I know that I shall be told that I am indulging my love of paradox, but nevertheless I maintain that if it is true that the most ardent admirations are those which are disguised in the form of envy, very often the strongest attractions are those which take the appearance of hate. In one of these tragi-comic, or rather comi-tragic, small towns I know two men who, though obliged to see one another constantly in the way of business, never greet one another in the street and profess a mutual detestation. Nevertheless at bottom they feel themselves reciprocally attracted to one another and each one is continually preoccupied by the other.
These irreconcilable feuds into which small towns are so often divided are much more favourable to the development of strong personalities than the bland comedy of a great metropolis, where those who fight a duel to the death on the public stage embrace oneanother behind the scenes. Do you suppose that the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is possible in a city that counts its inhabitants by the million?
And I ask you, do you suppose that anyone who sees a multitude of people in the course of the day, listens to this man to-day, to another man to-morrow and to another man the day after, and attends twenty or thirty conferences—do you think that such a one can preserve his spiritual integrity without any leakage? In such a life a hedgehog would end by becoming a lamb, its quills would turn into softest fleece, and for my part I would rather be a hedgehog than a lamb.
I understand why Willoughby fled from London as from the burial-place of the individual man. Is it not a terrible thing to walk through two or three miles of city streets and pass two or three thousand people without meeting a single known face to set a spark to a train of human thought? A glance of hate from a known enemy is sweeter than a glance of indifference, if not of disdain, from an unknown stranger. For man has acquired the habit of disdaining those whom he does not know, and seems to suppose that every stranger must be presumed to be an imbecile until he proves himself otherwise.
And those who say that they are bored in a small town? The reason is because they have not dug down to its tragic roots, to the august severity of the depths of its monotony.
It is my belief that in great cities proud natures become vain, that is to say, the quills become fleece.
And for the man who is engaged in any kind of work in which he can exercise his influence from a distance,for the writer or the painter, the small town offers the inestimable advantage of enabling him to live far from his public and of its being possible that the effects which his work produces either do not reach him or reach him only after a searching process of filtration. He can live more or less independently of his public, without allowing himself to be influenced by it, and this is the only way of making a public for oneself instead of adapting oneself to it.
If this be the case, it may be urged that a village would be better than a small town, a hamlet or perhaps even a remote farm-house. But no, for then there would be lacking that minimum of organic society without which our personality runs as much risk as it runs in the heart of a metropolis.
Essentially, in the sphere of psychologico-sociological relations—this is for the benefit of those who insist on labelling me savant—it is a question of what is perhaps the most fundamental of all problems, the problem of maxima and minima. This is the problem that is the nerve of physical mechanics and the nerve also of social mechanics or economics. The problem always is how to obtain the maximum result or profit with the minimum effort or expense, the largest return with the least expenditure. It is also the fundamental problem of æsthetics; it is at the root of all the problems of life.
And with regard to the subject I am now considering, it is a question of obtaining the maximum of our own personality with the minimum of others’ society. Less society, or a society less complex, would diminish our personality, and so also would more society, or a society apparently more complex. And I say apparently, for I am not aware that an elephant is more complex than a fox.
Very well then—he who has no sense of his own personality and is willing to sacrifice it on the altar of sociability, let him go and lose himself among the millions of a metropolis. For the man who has a longing for Nirvana the metropolis is better than the desert. If you want to submerge your own “I,” better the streets of a great city than the solitudes of the wilderness.
It is not a bad thing now and again to visit the great city and plunge into the sea of its crowds, but in order to emerge again upon terra firma and feel the solid ground under one’s feet. For my part, since I am interested in individuals—in John and Peter and Richard, in you who are reading this book—but not in the masses which they form when banded together, I remain in the small town, seeing every day at the same hour the same men, men whose souls have clashed, and sometimes painfully, with my soul; and I flee from the great metropolis where my soul is whipped with the icy whips of the disdainful glances of those who knowme not and who are unknown to me. People whom I cannot name ... horrible!
Yes, I know it—I am not sympathetic to all those who read me, perhaps not even to the majority of them. But what I am to do?... So long as they go on reading me.... For the fact is I would rather that they should find me not sympathetic and nevertheless go on reading me than that they should find me sympathetic and cease to read me. Sympathy is often purchased at the cost of authority and respect. I confess that the quality of being sympathetic does not appear to me to be a very desirable thing in a writer. It is perhaps the beginning of discredit, a discredit that is none the less profound because it wears a gilded disguise.
Yes, I know that I am not sympathetic, that I have perhaps succeeded in making myself antipathetic to many of those who read me and who in spite of this antipathy—or rather because of it—still continue to read me.
A short time ago a friend wrote to me saying that although he often disagrees with me he reads me because his reaction to my opinions stimulates ideas in him. I profess myself well content with this, to beget ideas in those who read me, although these ideas should be the contrary of those which I expound and defend.
But there are many, very many readers who don’t like being obliged to think and who only want to be told what they already know, what they have alreadythought. In order to become sympathetic a writer has only to flatter and confirm his readers’ preconceptions, clinching the commonplaces to which their minds have given assent. That is the way for a writer to become sympathetic and it is also the way for him to become soon tedious, so that the reader remarks: “Ah, yes, a very sympathetic writer, very understanding!” and ceases to read him.
Most people—I have said this more than once before and as I am an insistent writer, another quality which does not help to make me sympathetic, I shall have to repeat it many times more—most people read in order not to be informed. Yes, literally, not to be informed. The worthy Fulánez takes the paper or the review at breakfast-time and reads it as he would listen to a waltz-tune, in order to while away the time. He dislikes being agitated, he dislikes being contradicted; but most of all he dislikes being told something that he has never thought of before.
There is a spiritual pain analogous to physical pain; there is a spiritual pain when the tissues of the soul are torn away. For just as the body has its tissues of cells and filaments, so the soul has its tissues of impressions, memories, sensations and ideas. The breaking of an association of ideas is like the breaking of an association of bodily cells and may produce anything from a slight irritation to the most acute pain.
It is a matter of common observation that the pain which we feel at the death of someone dear to us, with whom we have lived together, at first goes on increasing until it reaches a point when it begins to diminish. Its progress might be described by a rapidly ascendingand gradually descending curve. The first effect is one of stupor. The pain becomes most acute when we feel the gap that has been left in our existence, when we feel the rupture of our associations of ideas and feelings. The image of the loved one was intimately woven into the spiritual tissue of our life, and death cannot tear it away without destroying the tissue.
And every rupture of an association of ideas and feelings is accompanied by a disturbance which varies in degree from the pain that we feel at the death of a father, husband, wife, brother or son, to the minor irritation which is caused by the exploding of some commonplace that had become a habit of our mind. And we writers who are given to breaking these associations—and that is why we are called paradoxists—jar on people and incur their antipathy. It is our fate.
And they tell us that what jars is not so much what we say as our way of saying it. Yes, it is because instead of cutting these associations with surgical delicacy, first chloroforming or hypnotizing the patient, we tear them roughly and when he is most wide awake. It is a question of method, and it is a question of temperament. Chloroform, the clinical as well as the literary variety, has its inconveniences, and there are cases in which the patient has to suffer pain. To irritate people may even become a duty binding upon the conscience, a painful duty, but a duty none the less.
And then there is another thing which makes me antipathetic, I know, and that is my lack of impersonality, my incapacity to produce what is called objective work, my putting my whole self, more or less, into all my writings, my egotism, as it is called. Butwhat am I to do?... I am amazed at those who are able to eliminate their own selves, I am amazed, but I don’t imitate them and I don’t wish to imitate them.
I don’t know how it may be elsewhere, but here in Spain the man, the individual man, irritates us. And as I believe that the great battle is how to win respect for man, respect for individuality, I for my part irritate the myriad-headed, anonymous multitude. Let them respect me. Thus they will learn to respect every individual, to respect themselves as individuals.
Yes, yes, it is quite right to use one’s knowledge with discretion, just as it is quite right to use one’s wealth with discretion. But neither knowledge nor wealth is one’s self; they are something annexed, something that comes and goes, that can be taken or left. But I cannot make a discreet use of myself. If I am deprived of a shilling or a dollar I can submit to it, but I cannot easily submit to being deprived of an arm or, still less, of a piece of my soul. A shilling or a dollar I can give away discreetly, but an arm or a piece of my soul, these I can only tear off and give away passionately, that is to say indiscreetly. And I do not give ideas, I do not give knowledge—I give pieces of my soul. The ideas that I expound matter to me less, far less, than the way I expound them.
It is not the shilling that I give you that counts, but the warmth that it carries with it from my hand.
These antipathies that I provoke proceed—as well I know, in spite of whatever those who see only the surface may say—from the fact that I am not an intellectual but a man of passion. Almost all the things thatI have said, hundreds, thousands, have said before me. I am neither erudite nor a savant. There is no great originality in my ideas. Whence, then, the potency which, thanks to God, I have attained? Whence these antipathies and sympathies, and how is it that I am able to say, thanks to God, that I am seldom read with indifference?—It is due to passion, to the tone of my voice.
Yes, I know it, I am antipathetic to many of my readers, and one of the things that makes me most antipathetic to them is my aggressiveness, my sometimes morbid aggressiveness. I don’t deny it. But the truth is, my friend, that this aggressiveness is directed against myself. When I attack others I am attacking myself. I live in a state of inward conflict. I imagine that I am misinterpreted? Very likely, since I myself do not always succeed in interpreting myself aright. The ideas that crowd in upon me from all quarters are always battling together in my mind and I fail to make peace between them. I fail because I don’t even try. I need these battles.
And, moreover I am not anxious for a reputation among scholars, for I am not a scholar, I am not what is called a scholar. Nor even among men of culture, although I am always preaching culture. But by culture I understand the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle, of intensest disquietude, of intensest desire. I come of a race which some people say is still, in its essence, in a state of savagery, a race of a turbulent and taciturn spirit, a race of which Salmerón said that it had not yet adapted itself to European civilization. And so far as I myself and my own branch ofthe race[4]are concerned, I accept this judgment and I accept it with pride.
No, no, friend, I am not a philanthropist. The hunger and thirst for God are too strong within me for me to love men in the philanthropic way. Needs must be sown among men germs of doubt, of distrust, of inquietude, and even of despair—why not? yes, even of despair—and if thereby they lose what they call happiness, since it is not really happiness, they have lost nothing.
And above all and before all, none of this living in peace with all the world! Living in peace with all the world—horrible, horrible, horrible! No, no, no, none of this living in peace. Peace, spiritual peace I mean, is usually a lie and is usually stagnation. I do not wish to live in peace either with others or with myself. I need war, inward war. We all need war.
Truth before peace. That is my watchword. And to give it greater brilliance I will write it in Latin:veritas primus pace. And it goes without saying that the war that I need as the sustenance of my life and of the lives of others is a spiritual war, not war with gun and sword.
All the rest—in spite of whatever the champions of the central current of culture and of disciplined solidarity and of respect for the so-called definitive conquests of the human spirit may say—all the rest I understand and I am even ready to applaud it if you like; but it is not my concern, it is not my lot to put myself at its service.
And above all, my friend, there is one thing that Ihave hated all my life and that I hope to die hating, and that is, becoming the prisoner of my public, submitting to follow the course marked out for me by my readers. I will not sacrifice my independence, above all I will not mortgage my future. You understand? I will not mortgage my future. I will keep it open and free.
And so I alienate sympathy?... Who knows? What I want to avoid is public indifference. Sympathies and antipathies are perhaps the same thing. Antipathy—now for a paradox!—is a form of sympathy. Reading me for the sake of being annoyed and quarrelling with what I say or my way of saying it, is the same as reading me and agreeing with what I say. To combat a man is one way of animating and confirming him.
I have put warmth and life into my books and it is for the sake of the warmth and life I have put into them that you read them. I have put passion into my books. Passion of hate, passion of disdain, passion of contempt very often—I don’t deny it. But does warmth come only from this thing that they call love and which, ninety times out of a hundred, is nothing but drivelling mawkishness and debility of spirit? And I have put my loves into my books too, those loves which beget my indignations, those loves which are the cause of my being so often harsh, severe, disdainful. Yes, love makes me antipathetic, a greater and purer love than that delusive sympathy which some people urge me to seek after.
Never, never, never! Let such apostleship be for others. Every man has his own destiny.
And this is not a presumption of superiority. No, don’t think that. If you suspect such a thing it is because you don’t know me. No, it is not that. I don’t condemn your opinion; I don’t regard the advice you give me as bad; I only say that it is no use to me. I tell you that you are mistaken about me. And not because you lack intelligence, no, a thousand times no. You are mistaken because each of us sets out from a different point of view, or rather from a different point of feeling. You appear to me to be an optimist, or at any rate a man who believes that progress will alleviate the pains of mankind; you speak with a certain unction of the noble crusade of thought and of the great enterprise of culture, and I believe that the best that this enterprise can do is to make us forget that we have been born and that we have to die. I confess that I have a tragic sense of life. I confess it without petulance or pedantry, and I know that you will not doubt my sincerity.
This bitterness that you find so disagreeable in my writings has grown with being exercised against myself. I am the sword and the whetstone and I sharpen my sword on myself. Hence it is that I am as tired with the sword-play as I am with sharpening the sword that I play with.
And if I am to tell you the truth, it hurts and wounds me to see men marching as confidently as if they marched on solid ground, some confident in the prejudices and anti-prejudices of their religious beliefs, others slaves of science, others slaves of ignorance, slaves all of them. I would have them doubt, I would have them suffer, above all I would have them despair,I would have them be men and not mere partisans of the party of progress. Despair, even though it be a resigned despair, is perhaps the highest state that man can attain to.
God, friend, did not send me into the world to be an apostle of peace, or to reap sympathy, but to be a sower of disquietude and irritation and to endure antipathy. Antipathy is the price of my redemption.
I
It would seem, Miguel, that your audience will have to allow you, if only just for once, to talk aloud to yourself, to unburden your heart.—Do it now, and then it will be all the easier to do it again some other day.—Writing for the public is a harsh kind of slavery.
Doubtless you willed it. You chose to be a writer and you must patiently bear the consequences of your choice. But are we as free to choose our vocation as we think we are?
You crave retirement, tranquillity and silence in order that you may devote yourself to some solid and unhurried task, remote from the turmoil that deafens the ear with its noise and blinds the eye with its dust. Your heart with its yearning for solitude turns longingly towards those men of old who dedicated themselves to works that endure, far from the traffic of the world with its daily contentions and anxieties. You yearn for the classic, the eternally classic. But the vertigo of life sweeps you along and you find yourself involved in the burning dissensions of your contemporaries. You cannot live among the dead; you have to live among the living.
And yet, dear Miguel, what a source of consolation and strength is this intercourse with the glorious dead, whose works never die! How the soul is refreshed bythe vivifying streams that flow from those immortal spirits who live their deepest lives in us—Homer, Plato, Virgil, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, and so many others!
Yes, there is no doubt about it—this insane eagerness to know what those round about us are saying or repeating hinders us from following the progress of the human soul as it reveals itself in its immortal sons, those erect pillars that are landmarks for all time. What does it matter to you, tell me, what your neighbour is clamouring about? You are not going to follow the example of those whose time and soul are so absorbed in listening to all the superficialities of their contemporaries that they have no time left to enjoy the enduring legacy of humanity. This form of modernity serves only to enfeeble both men and peoples. Distrust novelties, Miguel, and be sure that there is nothing more novel than what is for ever. Homer and Shakespeare are more modern than most of the living writers who are accounted most modern. You will learn more from Plato than from the author of the latest volume in Alcan’s Library of Modern Philosophy. The modern is the fashionable and you must fly from all fashions.
But it is useless—I know it—useless. I can see that the voices round about you, the ardent voices of the living, have caught your ear, perhaps in spite of yourself. It is the voice of humanity, and you are and ought to be before all else a man. Do you remember what your dead friend Coleridge, the wonderful Coleridge, says in hisBiographia Literariaabout his contemporaries? I will repeat it to you again:
“The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one who exists to receive it.”
“The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one who exists to receive it.”
Consider this same Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote these words and tell me if the memory of this man who died many years before you were born can give you that glow which the recollection of one still living gives you. And nevertheless, you will say, how sweet and peaceful it is to converse with those who once were and to-day sleep in the lap of the teeming earth.
You have dreamed of producing amagnum opusthat would endure, and you find yourself condemned to the fragmentary and fugitive labour of journalism. Must you repine at that? We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.
And remember that the slowly and carefully elaborated work of the solitary author, holding himself aloof from all collaboration with his public, is perhaps after all only the monument of his own egoism.
Collaboration with the public, I say. For the public collaborates more or less ostensibly in the workof every publicist, sometimes with applause, sometimes with censure. I know that you have been influenced in your work by the letters which from time to time you receive from unknown readers, especially from those in America, and which have provided you with helpful notes and suggestions. But in addition to this, you are influenced, perhaps without knowing it, by the reaction of your readers, of those who follow your work, and this reaction affects what you write, forcing you sometimes to adapt yourself to your readers’ point of view, sometimes to combat it and endeavour to make it conform to yours.
It is said that some of the greatest dramas, among others those of Shakespeare, have been actually created on the stage, in collaboration with the public, having been modified at every representation according to the way in which the public received them. And do you not think that the successive works of a productive author are not very often merely successive editions, more or less revised, of one and the same work?
Every author who writes much repeats himself much; the more original he is and the more he draws from his own depths instead of merely echoing what he hears round about him, the more he repeats himself. The greatest geniuses have been men of few and simple ideas expressed with vigour and efficacy, but expressed also with more uniformity and continuity than those of writers of only average ability. There have been men whose greatness has been owing to the fact that they were men of one idea, men who were simply an idea incarnate. By dint of living one single but noble and fruitful idea, they have succeeded in presenting itto us in all its forms. Variety, multiplicity of points of view, almost always indicates a certain spiritual weakness. But I do not need to convince you of this, for I know how much you admire Athanasius for being a man of one idea.
Yes, your own works, in spite of their apparent variety—novels, commentaries, essays, poems—are, if you consider it carefully, simply the continuous development in multiple forms of but one and the same fundamental idea. And in thus seeking to communicate this central thought of yours, you go on condensing it more and more and discovering new forms of expression for it, until perhaps some day you will hit upon the most adequate, the most precise form. And, believe me, a writer achieves a lasting place when he has discovered the permanent form of any idea, when he has succeeded in giving it its definitive body. And in your effort to discover this, who shall say that this writing of fugitive and fragmentary pieces is not as useful as any other way of search? You know that very often one thinks more when talking than when meditating.
Do you remember that experience which occurred to you one afternoon when you were walking with your friend Vincent, that wise and subtle spirit, so unhappily cut off in his prime? You were arguing as usual; his subtle objections forced you to concentrate your mind, and after a quick reply to one of his questions, almost before the words were out of your mouth, you exclaimed delightedly: “How right that is! how exact! how precise!” And when he showed surprise that you should be astonished by one of your own remarks,you said: “The fact is, it is as new to me as it is to you. Doubtless the solution was already there in my mind, but it was dim and confused. I myself was not conscious of its being there. It was only in the effort to meet your objections that it took shape and disclosed itself to me. And so you see it was really as new to me as to you.”
And so it often happens. Thought depends upon language, for we think with words, and language is a social thing. Language is conversation. And thought itself is therefore social. The only clear thought is transmissible thought. If anyone tells you that he sees a thing quite clearly but that he does not know how to communicate it, you may reply that he cannot be sure whether he sees it clearly or not. To every writer it has happened more than once that he has realized the absurdity or obscurity of his own thought only after he has seen it in print.
Be assured, then, that you meditate more and meditate better when you are writing things like this letter that you are now addressing to yourself than when you shut yourself up in your room to devote yourself to what is called meditation and what is really only mind-wandering. The necessity of giving your thought transmissible expression is that which makes it a living and effective process. It is when your pen is in your hand that things occur to you most readily, and the reason is because then you are not thinking for yourself but thinking for others. Thinking for oneself is not properly thinking—it is losing oneself in vague reveries, like a man on the verge of sleep idly watching the driftof his cigar-smoke. To think is to think for others; thinking is a social function.
You have sometimes heard it said that Paul of Tarsus used to draw inspiration from his own words, that these words provoked ideas, and that in his epistles it is possible to follow this process of ideation by means of verbal associations. And of Augustine of Hippo—one of the immortal pillars, like Paul, Bernard and Martin Luther, of the Christianity of the heart—it has been said that he developed his theme by antitheses, that is to say rhetorically. And both Paul and Augustine were men of burning passion, not solitary contemplatives, but active fighters.
They consider you to be an egotist because you often refer to yourself—you are doing it now in this soliloquy—and talk about yourself, but the truth is that this self of yours, in so far as you are a writer, is something that belongs to all the world—you stand in the middle of the street, hailed by everybody and answering back. You would be not merely an egotist but a miserable egoist if you shut yourself up in the tower of ivory, far from your fellows, and worked day after day upon some minute and exquisite jewel. You work in the open air, in the public gaze, and from time to time, in order to keep your work clean, you blow away the dust of the turmoil that has settled upon it.
Enough. Let us talk no more together, you and I, this hidden and intimate self and this apparent and public self. Are they really two? Are you anything else but a writer? Or rather, this self that is not the publicist, of what worth is it?
II
It appears to be the fact that many people believe me to be a man who lives shut up in a library, buried among books, isolated from the world. They say that I lack what they call the sense of reality. As for the first charge, that I spend my days devouring books, it is a pure fiction. I travel more than I wish to travel and I see more people than I wish to see. With regard to the second, my lack of the sense of reality—let us consider it.
That which men of the world—and in my speech and writings I always use this phrase in a sufficiently depreciatory sense—that which men of the world call the sense of reality appears to me to be no more than a sense of apparentiality. A man is said to possess the sense of reality who stops to consider only the transient surface of things and does not penetrate into their permanent substance.
Those who are said to possess this sense of reality are interested only in news, what is called the latest information. And as for me—I must say it perfectly frankly—I detest the latest information. There is nothing in the newspaper that strikes me as so empty as the page devoted to the latest news. This craving to have news, news usually lacking in any deep import, as quickly as possible, seems to me puerile. The important thing, I have always supposed, is to know things thoroughly, not to know them quickly.
But the current runs in the other direction. For one who reads a book with the sole purpose of knowing,enjoying and profiting by it, there are twenty who read it simply in order to say that they have read it and to gain kudos by quoting from it.
There are, or at any rate there ought to be, in each one of us two men, the temporal and the eternal, the one who is preoccupied with the cares of the passing day and the one who is preoccupied with the eternal preoccupations, the one who says: “What shall I eat, or how shall I amuse myself to-morrow?” and the one who says: “What will happen to us after death?” In some cases the inner man dominates and leads captive the external man and then the individual either retires to a monastery or he lives a life of resigned despair, ceaseless wrestling with mystery; and in some cases the external and temporal man subjugates and strangles the inner and eternal man, and then we have the man of the world, the man who boasts of being practical and of possessing the sense of reality. And this practical man does not interest me in the least.
When I find myself in a modern city, in one of these cities that are called progressive because of their system of police and hygiene, with smoothly paved streets, pretentious buildings, electric trams, luxurious motors replete with fashionably dressed women, well-kept parks, comfortable clubs, theatres—in short, complete with all the apparatus of a modern city—whenever I find myself in such a city I am enveloped, invaded and oppressed by a sense of profound and utter solitude. The men appear to me like shadows without substance. And like Diogenes I begin to look for a man, a real man, a man who wrestles with destiny and mystery, a man of religious spirit, a man, in short, who believes inGod or denies Him, but who believes in Him or denies Him passionately, with the heart, not merely in virtue of some philosophical formula forming part of the general knowledge that a well-educated man is expected to possess.
I set about looking for a man ... and rarely, very rarely, do I find him. “The man you ought to know is López,” they tell me, “a man of culture and distinction.” And so, although without any illusion, and chiefly in order not to offend the friend who recommends him to me, I get to know López. And in effect López has read a great deal and knows the names of the most prominent writers and publicists and discusses Comte and Spencer and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and has read the latest French novelists, and knows several famous passages of poetry by heart and has his tincture of history, sociology, psychology and natural science, and López ... is not the man I am looking for.
It is not the great classic authors that López has read, the essential geniuses, the men who have gazed at the Sphinx face to face, but rather their expositors and commentators; he knows the great minds of all time as they are reflected in manuals of the history of philosophy or literature. Once perhaps, not so much even for curiosity’s sake as to be able to say that he has read them, he has looked into the book of Job or St. Augustine or Pascal or à Kempis, but his heart has not been touched. And naturally López does not interest me, does not even appear to me to be a man; he is simply a member of a club, or a member of Parliament, or a brilliant figure in polite society. His distinction is of the same category as that of his wife’s mediocre facility in playing the piano. López knows how to present himself to the best advantage.
But fortunately and thanks to God I do not live in one of these cities, which are all alike, all attempting to imitate Paris. I live in an ancient city, whose age is perpetual youth, whose golden stones distil memories. And even so, whenever I can I escape into the country and there I talk with some old shepherd who has brooded for long hours beneath the sky upon eternal themes. And this man who reads no newspapers, who does not know where Serbia is and has never heard of Dreyfus or Anatole France or the Kaiser, who knows nothing about the latest sociological theory or the latest fashion in morning coats, this man speaks to me the ancient words of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. And as he has never read Ecclesiastes, but has derived his wisdom from the same fount, the ancient words come to me new, eternally new.
Many times I have wished in my secret heart that I had lived in one of those ages of burning faith, among a people consumed by an infinite passion, among the Crusaders or among the Albigenses, in the ranks of Cromwell’s Ironsides or of Coligny’s Huguenots, or in the obscurity of the monastery in which Heinrich Seuss underwent his tremendous mortifications.... But who in God’s name, if he be a man and a real man, can stand one of those banquets with which the friends of the distinguished López celebrate the honour of his being appointed governor of a province, with their interminable toasts, all full of the same empty platitudes, pronounced to the hateful accompaniment of thepopping of champagne corks? When the unavoidable exigencies of social servitude compel me to attend one of these ceremonies of homage, I feel a desire to get up and say: “Brothers, let us meditate upon death!” and launch forth into a sermon. I don’t do so, of course, though not for fear of ridicule, but because I know that it would avail nothing.
But enough of unbosoming myself. You needn’t be afraid, I know that I am a slave, I know that we are all slaves.... I will return to the beaten track, I will return to “objective” themes, but.... But must my heart never be allowed the relief of a sigh, a sigh at once of resignation and rebellion? Must I not be allowed some time to say that all this that you call civilization appears to me to be nothing but the trappings of culture and that those who are content merely with the trappings are savages muffled in royal robes, and that the splendour of your metropolises leaves me cold?
A friend writing to me from Chile tells me that he has met people acquainted with my writings who have asked him: “What, in a word, is the religion of this Señor Unamuno?” I myself have several times been asked a similar question. And I am going to see if I cannot—I will not say, answer it, for that is a thing I do not pretend to be able to do, but endeavour at any rate to elucidate the meaning of the question.
Individuals as well as peoples characterized by intellectual inertia—and intellectual inertia is quite compatible with great productive activity in the sphere of economics and in other kindred spheres—tend to dogmatism, whether they know it or not, whether they wish it or not, whether they intend it or not. Intellectual inertia shuns the critical or sceptical attitude.
I say sceptical, taking the word scepticism in its etymological and philosophical sense, for the sceptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found. The one is the man who studies a problem and the other is the man who gives us a formula, correct or incorrect, as the solution of it.
In the order of pure philosophical speculation it is premature to demand that an investigator shall produce a definite solution of a problem while he is engaged in defining the problem itself more exactly. When a longcalculation does not work out correctly, it is no small step forward to rub it all out and begin afresh. When a house threatens to collapse or becomes completely uninhabitable, the first thing to do is to pull it down and not to demand that another shall be built on top of it. The new house may indeed be built with materials taken from the old one, but only after the old one has first been demolished. In the meantime, if there is no other house available, the people can find shelter in a hut or sleep in the open.
And it is necessary not to lose sight of the fact that in the problems of practical life we must seldom expect to find definite scientific solutions. Men live and always have lived upon hazardous hypotheses and explanations, and sometimes even without them. Men have not waited to agree as to whether or not the criminal was possessed of free will before punishing him, and a man does not pause before sneezing to reflect upon the possible injury that may be caused by the obstructing particle that provokes him to sneeze.
I think that those men are mistaken who assert that they would live evilly if they did not believe in the eternal pains of hell, and the mistake is all to their credit. If they ceased to believe in a sanction after death, they would not live worse, but they would look for some other ideal justification for their conduct. The good man is not good because he believes in a transcendental order, but rather he believes in it because he is good—a proposition which I am sure must appear obscure or involved to those inquirers who suffer from intellectual inertia.
I am asked, then: “What is your religion?” AndI will reply: My religion is to seek truth in life and life in truth, even though knowing full well that I shall never find them so long as I live; my religion is to wrestle unceasingly and unwearyingly with mystery; my religion is to wrestle with God from nightfall until the breaking of the day, as Jacob is said to have wrestled with Him. I cannot accommodate myself to the doctrine of the Unknowable or to that of “thus far and no farther.” I reject the everlastingIgnorabimus. And at all hazards I seek to scale the unattainable.
“Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” Christ said to us, and such an ideal of perfection is, without doubt, unattainable. But He put the unattainable before us as the goal and term of our endeavours. And He attained to it, say the theologians, by grace. And I wish to fight my fight careless of victory. Are there not armies and even peoples who march to certain defeat? Do we not praise those who die fighting rather than surrender? This, then, is my religion.
Those who put this question to me want me to give them a dogma, a solution which they can accept without disturbing their mental inertia. Or rather it is not this that they want, so much as to be able to label me and put me into one of the divisions in which they classify minds, so that they can say of me: He is a Lutheran, a Calvanist, a Catholic, an atheist, a rationalist, a mystic, or any other of those nicknames whose exact meaning they do not understand but which dispense them from further thinking. And I do not wish to have myself labelled, for I, Miguel de Unamuno, like every other man who aspires to full consciousness, am a unique species. “There are no diseases, but onlypersons who are diseased,” some doctors say, and I say that there are no opinions, but only opining persons.
In religion there is but little that is capable of rational resolution, and as I do not possess that little I cannot communicate it logically, for only the rational is logical and transmissible. I have, it is true, so far as my affections, my heart and my feelings are concerned, a strong bent towards Christianity, but without adhering to the special dogmas of this or that Christian confession. I count every man a Christian who invokes the name of Christ with respect and love, and I am repelled by the orthodox, whether Catholic or Protestant—the latter being usually as intransigent as the former—who deny the Christianity of those who interpret the Gospel differently from themselves. I know a Protestant Christian who denies that Unitarians are Christians.
I frankly confess that the supposed rational proofs—ontological, cosmological, ethical, etc.—of the existence of God, prove to me nothing; that all the reasons adduced to show that a God exists appear to me to be based on sophistry and begging of the question. In this I am with Kant. And in discussions of this kind, I feel that I am unable to talk to cobblers in the terms of their craft.
Nobody has succeeded in convincing me rationally of the existence of God, nor yet of His non-existence; the arguments of atheists appear to me even more superficial and futile than those of their opponents. And if I believe in God, or at least believe that I believe in Him, it is, first of all, because I wish that God may exist, and then, because He is revealed to me,through the channel of the heart, in the Gospel and in Christ and in history. It is an affair of the heart.
Which means that I am not convinced of it as I am of the fact that two and two make four.
If it were a question of something that did not touch my peace of conscience or console me for having been born, perhaps I should pay no heed to the problem; but as it involves my whole interior life and the spring of all my actions, I cannot quiet myself by saying: I do not know nor can I know. I do not know, that is certain; perhaps I can never know. But I want to know. I want to, and that is enough.
And I shall spend my life wrestling with mystery, and even without hope of penetrating it, for this wrestling is my sustenance and my consolation. Yes, my consolation. I have accustomed myself to wrest hope from despair itself. And let not fools in their superficiality shriek: Paradox!
I cannot conceive of a man of culture without this preoccupation, and in point of culture—and culture is not the same as civilization—I can hope but little from those who live without interest in the metaphysical aspect of the religious problem, and only study it in its social or political aspects. I can hope but very little for the enrichment of the spiritual treasury of mankind from those men or from those peoples who, whether it be from intellectual inertia, or from superficiality, or from scientificism, or from any other cause, are unmoved by the great and eternal disquietudes of the heart. I can hope nothing from those who say: “We must not think about these things!” I can hope even less from those who believe in a heaven and a hellsuch as those which we believed in when we were children; and still less can I hope from those who affirm with a fool’s gravity: “All this is but myth and fable; he who dies is buried and there’s an end of it.” I can hope for something only from those who do not know, but who are not resigned not to know; from those who fight unrestingly for the truth and put their life in the fight itself rather than in the victory.
The greater part of my work has always been to disquiet my neighbours, to rob them of heart’s ease, to vex them if I can. I have said this already in my commentary upon “The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho,” in which I have confessed myself most fully. Let them seek as I seek, let them wrestle as I wrestle, and between us all we will tear some shred of secret from God, and at any rate this wrestling will make us more men, men of more spirit.
In order to accomplish this work—a religious work—among peoples like those that speak the Castilian tongue who suffer from intellectual inertia and superficiality, slumbering in the routine of Catholic dogma or in the dogmatism of free-thought or of scientificism, it has been necessary for me to appear sometimes shameless and indecorous, at other times harsh and aggressive, and not a few times perverse and paradoxical. In our pusillanimous literature it was a rare thing to hear anyone cry out from the depths of his heart, to get excited, to exclaim. The shout was almost unknown. Writers were frightened of making themselves ridiculous. They behaved and still behave like those who put up with an affront in the street for fear of the ridicule of being seen with their hat on theground marched off by the police. But I, no! When I have felt like shouting I have shouted. Never have I been restrained by decorum. And this is one of the things for which I have never been forgiven by my colleagues of the pen, so discreet, so correct, so disciplined, even when they preach indiscretion and indiscipline. Literary anarchists are more punctilious about style and syntax than about anything else. And when they play out of tune they do so tunefully; their discords resolve themselves into harmonies.
When I have felt a pain I have shouted and shouted in public. The psalms which are to be found in myPoesíasare simply the cries from the heart with which I have sought to make the heart-strings of the wounded hearts of others vibrate. If they have no heart-strings or only heart-strings that are too rigid to vibrate, then my cry will awaken no echo in them and they will declare that it is not poetry and they will proceed to investigate its acoustic properties. It is possible also to study acoustically the cry that is torn from the heart of a man who sees his son suddenly fall down dead—and he who has neither heart nor sons will understand no more of it than the acoustics.
These psalms, together with various other pieces in myPoesías, are my religion, a religion that I have sung, not expressed in logic and reasoning. And I sing it as best I can, with the voice and ear that God has given me, because I cannot reason it. And he to whom my verses appear to be more full of reasoning and logic and method and exegesis than of life, because they are not peopled with fauns, dryads, satyrs and the like or garbed in the latest modernist fashion, had betterleave them alone, for it is evident that I shall not touch his heart whether I use a violin bow or a hammer.
What I fly from, I repeat, as from the plague, is any kind of classification of myself, and when I die I hope I shall still hear these intellectual sluggards inquiring: “And this gentleman, what is he?” Liberal or progressive fools will take me for a reactionary and perhaps for a mystic, without understanding of course what they may mean; and conservative and reactionary fools will take me for a kind of spiritual anarchist; and both of them will pity me as an unfortunate gentleman anxious to distinguish himself by singularity, hoping to be reputed an original, and with a bonnet full of bees. But no one need worry about what fools think of him, be they progressive or conservative, liberal or reactionary.
And since man is naturally intractable, and does not habitually thirst for the truth, and after being preached at for four hours usually returns to all his inveterate habits, these busy inquirers, if they chance to read this, will return to me with the question: “Well, but what solutions do you offer?” And I will tell them, once and for all, that if it is solutions they want, they can go to the shop opposite, for I do not deal in the article. My earnest desire has been, is and will be that those who read me should think and meditate on fundamental things, and it has never been to furnish them with thoughts ready made. I have always sought to agitate and to suggest rather than to instruct. It is not bread that I sell, not bread, but yeast, ferment.
I have friends, and good friends, who advise me to abandon this task and to concentrate upon what theycall some objective work, something which will be, so they express it, definitive, something constructive, something that will last. They mean something dogmatic. I declare that I am incapable of it, and I claim my liberty, my holy liberty, even, if need be, the liberty of contradicting myself. I do not know whether anything that I have written or may write in the future is destined to live for years and centuries after I am dead; but I know that if anyone agitates the surface of a shoreless sea the waves will go radiating without end, even though at last they dwindle into ripples. To agitate is something. And if thanks to this agitation another who comes after me shall create something that will live, then my work will live in his.
It is a work of supreme mercy to awaken the sleeper and to shake the sluggard, and it is a work of supreme religious piety to seek truth in everything and to expose fraud, stupidity and ignorance wherever they are to be found.
It is my love for the multitude that makes me fly from them. In flying from them, I go on seeking them. Do not call me a misanthrope. Misanthropes seek society and intercourse with people; they need them in order to feed their hatred and disdain of them. Love can live upon memories and hopes; hate needs present realities.
Let me, then, fly from society and take refuge in the quiet of the country, seeking in the heart of it and within my own soul the company of people.
Men only feel themselves really brothers when they hear one another in the silence of things in the midst of solitude. The hushed moan of your neighbour which reaches you through the wall that separates you penetrates much more deeply into your heart than would all his laments if he told you them to your face. I shall never forget a night that I once spent at a watering-place, during the whole of which I was kept awake by a very faint intermittent moaning—a moaning that seemed to wish to stifle itself in order not to awaken those who were asleep, a discreet and gentle moaning that came to me from the neighbouring bedroom. That moaning, which came from I know not whom, had lost all personality; it produced upon me the illusion of coming out of the silence of the night itself, as if it were the silence or the night thatlamented, and there was even a moment when I dreamt that that gentle lament rose to the surface from the depths of my own soul.
I left the following day without having sought to ascertain who was the sufferer or why he suffered. And I believe that I have never felt so much pity for any other man.
It is only solitude that dissolves that thick cloak of shame that isolates us from one another; only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude. Solitude unites us, believe me, just as much as society separates us. And if we do not know how to love one another, it is because we do not know how to be alone.
It is only in solitude, when it has broken the thick crust of shame that separates us from one another and separates us all from God, that we have no secrets from God; only in solitude do we raise our heart to the Heart of the Universe; only in solitude does the redeeming hymn of supreme confession issue from our soul.
There is no other real dialogue than the dialogue that you hold with yourself, and you can hold this dialogue only when you are alone. In solitude and only in solitude can you know yourself as a neighbour; and so long as you do not know yourself as a neighbour, you can never hope to see in your neighbours other I’s. If you want to learn to love others, withdraw into yourself.
I am accused of not caring about or being interested in the anxieties of men. It is just the contrary. Iam convinced that there is no more than one anxiety, one and the same for all men, and never do I feel it or understand it more deeply than when I am alone. Each day I believe less and less in the social question, and in the political question, and in the æsthetic question, and in the moral question, and in the religious question, and in all the other questions that people have invented in order that they shall not have to face resolutely the only real question that exists—the human question, which is mine, yours, his, everyone’s.
And as I know that you will say that I am playing with words and that you will ask me what I mean by this human question, I shall have to repeat it once again: The human question is the question of knowing what is to become of my consciousness, of yours, of his, of everyone’s, after each one of us has died. So long as we are not facing this question, all that we are doing is simply making a noise so that we shall not hear it. And that is why we fear solitude so much and seek the company of one another.
The greatest thing that there is among men is a poet, a lyric poet, that is to say a real poet. A poet is a man who keeps no secrets from God in his heart, and who, in singing his griefs, his fears, his hopes and his memories, purifies and purges them from all falsehood. His songs are your songs, are my songs.
Have you ever heard any deeper, any more intimate, any more enduring poetry than that of the Psalms? And the Psalms are meant for singing alone. I know that they are sung by crowds, assembled together under the same roof in religious services; but in singing themthe crowd ceases to be a crowd. In singing the Psalms, each one withdraws into himself and the voices of others echo in his ears simply as the consonance and reinforcement of his own voice.
And I observe this difference between a crowd assembled together to sing the Psalms and a crowd assembled to see a drama or to hear an orator: it is that the former is a real society, a company of living souls, in which each one exists and subsists by himself, while the other is a formless mass and each one of those who compose it no more than a fragment of the human herd.
I have never felt any desire to move a crowd, to exercise influence upon a mass of people—who lose their personality in being massed together—and on the other hand I have always felt a furious desire to perturb the heart of each individual man, to exercise an influence upon each one of my brothers in humanity. Whenever I have spoken in public I have almost always succeeded in employing a kind of lyrical oratory, and I have endeavoured to force upon myself the illusion that I was speaking to only one of my hearers, to any one, no matter which, to each one, not to all of themen masse.
We men are impenetrable. Spirits, like solid bodies, can only communicate with one another by the contact of surfaces, not by penetrating one another, still less by fusing together.
You have heard me say a thousand times that most spirits seem to me like crustaceans, with the bone outside and the flesh inside. And when in some book thatI have forgotten I read what a painful and terrible thing it would be if the human spirit were to be incarnated in a crab and had to make use of the crab’s senses, organs and members, I said to myself: “This is what actually happens; we are all unfortunate crabs, shut up in hard shells.”
And the poet is he whose flesh emerges from the shell, whose soul oozes forth. And when, in our hours of anguish or joy, our soul oozes forth, we are all of us poets.
And that is why I believe that it is necessary to agitate the masses, to shake men and winnow them as in a sieve, to throw against one another, in order to see if in this way their shells will not break and their spirits flow forth, whether they will not mingle and unite with one another, and whether the real collective spirit, the soul of humanity, may not thus be welded together.
But the sad thing is, if we are to go by past experience, that all these mutual rubbings and clashings, far from breaking the shells, harden, thicken and enlarge them. They are like corns that grow larger and stronger with rubbing. Although perhaps it is that the clashes are not violent enough. And in any case it must be clashing, not rubbing. I do not like to rub against people but to clash against them; I do not like to approach people obliquely and glance off them at a tangent, but to meet them frontally, and if possible split them in two. It is the best service I can do them. And there is no better preparation for this task than solitude.
It is very sad that we have to communicate with one another by touching, at most by rubbing, through themedium of the hard shells that isolate us from one another. And I am convinced that this hard shell becomes weaker and more delicate, in solitude, until it changes into the most tenuous membrane which permits of the action of osmosis and exosmosis. And that is why I believe that it is solitude that makes men really sociable and human.
There are two kinds of union: one by removing differences, separating the elements that differentiate from those that unite, the other by fusion, bringing these differences into agreement. If we take away from the mind of each man that which is his own, that way of looking at things that is peculiar to him, everything that he takes care to hide for fear people should think him mad, we are left with that which he has in common with everyone else, and this common element gives us that wretched thing that is called common sense and which is nothing more than the abstract of the practical intelligence. But if we fuse into one the differing judgments of people, with all that they jealously preserve, and bring their caprices, their oddities, their singularities into agreement, we shall have human sense, which, in those who are rich in it, is not common but private sense.
The best that occurs to men is that which occurs to them when they are alone, that which they dare not confess, not only not to their neighbour but very often not even to themselves, that which they fly from, that which they imprison within themselves while it is in a state of pure thought and before it can flower into words. And the solitary is usually daring enough toexpress this, to allow it to flower, and so it comes about that he speaks that which others think in solitude by themselves and which nobody dares to publish. The solitary thinks everything aloud, and surprises others by saying that which they think beneath their breath, while they seek to deceive one another by pretending to make them believe that they are thinking something else, but without anybody believing them.
All this will help you to deduce for yourself in what way and to what extent solitude is the great school of sociability, and how right it is that we should sometimes withdraw ourselves from men in order that we may the better serve them.