Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

There is no future, there is never any future. This thing that is called the future is one of the greatest of deceptions. The real future is to-day. What is going to happen to us to-morrow? There is no to-morrow. What is happening to us to-day? That is the only question.

And so far as to-day is concerned, all these petty souls are quite content because to-day they exist. Existing suffices them. Existence, sheer, naked existence, fills their whole soul. They don’t feel that there is something more than existing.

But do they exist? Do they really exist? I believe not. For if they existed, if they really existed, they would suffer because they existed, existing would not content them. If they really and truly existed in time and in space they would suffer because they did not exist in eternity and in infinity. And this suffering, this passion, which is nothing other than the passion of God in us, of God who in us suffers at feeling Himself imprisoned in our finitude and our temporality, this divine suffering would cause them to break all those paltry logical chains with which they seek to bind their paltry memories to their paltry hopes, the illusion of their past to the illusion of their future.

“Why does he do it?” Did Sancho, perchance, never inquire why Don Quixote did the things that he did?

And to return to your question, to your preoccupation: With what collective madness could we inoculate these tranquil multitudes? With what delirium?

You yourself have hinted at a solution in one of those letters in which you bombard me with questions. “Do you not believe,” you asked me, “that it might be possible to start some new crusade?”

Yes, I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the redemption of the sepulchre of Don Quixote from the dominion of the bachelors, curates, barbers, dukes and canons who have taken possession of it. I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the redemption of the sepulchre of the Knight of Folly from the dominion of the mandarins of Reason.

They will defend their usurpation, naturally, and will endeavour to prove with many and elaborate reasons that the guard and custody of the sepulchre belongs to them. They guard it in order that the Knight shall not rise again.

These reasons must be answered with insults, with stone-throwings, with shouts of passion, with lance-thrusts. These people are not to be reasoned with. If you try to reason against their reasons, you are lost.

If they ask you, as they usually do, by what right you claim the sepulchre, answer nothing. They will find out afterwards. Afterwards ... perhaps when both they and you no longer exist, at any rate not in this world of appearances.