Part 10
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 ascending and 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. But what 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 that I 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 of the 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 I have 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.
SOLILOQUIES
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 by the 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 his _Biographia Literaria_ about 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.”
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 a _magnum opus_ that 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 work of 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 it to 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 drift of 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.