Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

My friend, if you want to fulfil your task duly, distrust art, distrust science, or at any rate distrust that which is called art and science and which is nothing but a wretched mockery of true art and true science. Let your faith suffice you. Your faith will be your art, your faith will be your science.

More than once, when I observed what pains you take in composing your letters, I have doubted whether you would be able to accomplish your work. They are full of erasures, emendations, corrections, Pan-pipings. They don’t jet forth violently, driving out the plug. Occasionally your letters degenerate into literature, into that filthy literature which is the natural ally of all slaveries and of all ignominies. Slavedrivers know well enough that when the slave is singing a hymn to liberty, he is consoling himself for his slavery and not thinking about breaking his chain.

But at other times I regain my faith and hope in you when I feel beneath the hurrying, spontaneous, cacophonous words the voice trembling with the fever that consumes you. There are times when your speech may be said to belong to no determinate language. Let everyone translate it into his own.

Aim at living in a continual vertigo of passion, be the passion that dominates you what it may. Only men of passion achieve works that really live and bear fruit. When you hear it said of someone that his works are impeccable, in whichever sense that stupid word is employed, fly from him—above all if he is an artist. Just as the man who is most a fool is he who has never done or said a foolish thing, so the artist who is least a poet, most anti-poetic—and among artists anti-poetic natures are common—is the impeccable artist, the artist whom the Pan-pipe dancers decorate with the pasteboard laurel crown of impeccability.

You are consumed, my friend, with a perpetual fever, with a thirst for unfathomable, shoreless oceans, with a hunger for universes, with a home-sickness for eternity. Reason is suffering to you. And you don’t know what you want. And now, now you want to go to the sepulchre of the Knight of Folly and there dissolve yourself in tears, consume yourself in fever, die of your thirst for oceans, of your hunger for universes, of your home-sickness for eternity.

Begin to march, alone. All the other lonely souls will march by your side, even though you don’t see them. Each one will think that he marches alone, but together you will form a sacred battalion, the battalion of the holy and unending crusade.

You don’t yet understand, my good friend, how all lonely souls, without knowing one another, without beholding one another’s face, without knowing one another’s names, journey together and lend one another mutual support. The others, those who are not lonely, talk about one another, offer one another their hands, congratulate one another, belaud and denigrate one another, chatter among themselves—and each one goes his own way. And they all fly from the sepulchre.

You don’t belong to the coterie but to the battalion of free crusaders. Why do you hover round the walls of the coterie to hear what they are cackling about inside? No, my friend, no! When you pass close to a coterie, stop your ears, fling your word and go straight on, on to the sepulchre. And let the word that you fling vibrate with all your thirst, with all your hunger, with all your home-sickness, with all your love.

I remember that unhappy letter that you wrote me when you were on the point of succumbing, of yielding, of joining the confraternity. I saw then how much your solitude weighed upon you, that solitude which must be your consolation and your strength.

You had arrived at the most terrible and desolating state of all; you had approached the brink of the precipice of your perdition; you had come to doubt your solitude, you had come to believe that you were surrounded by companions. “May not this notion that I am alone,” you said, “be mere cavilling, the fruit of pride, of petulance, perhaps of madness? For when I am tranquil, I see myself companioned, I feel my hand warmly clasped, I hear voices of encouragement, words of sympathy, I receive all kinds of proofs that I am not alone—far from it.” And I saw you deceived and lost, I saw you flying from the sepulchre.