No, you are not deceived in the accesses of your fever, in the agonies of your thirst, in the anguish of your hunger; you are alone, eternally alone. Not only are the bites that you feel really bites, but those that seem like kisses are bites too. Those who applaud you are hissing you, they want to stop you marching to the sepulchre when they shout “Forward!” Stop your ears. And, above all, beware of a terrible temptation—however much you may try to shake it off, it will return to you with the pertinacity of a fly—beware of the temptation to concern yourself with how you appear to others. Think only of how you appear to God, think only of the idea that God has of you.
You are alone, much more alone than you imagine, and yet, even so, you have not arrived at absolute, utter, real solitude. Absolute, utter, real solitude consists in not being even with yourself. And you will not be really, utterly, absolutely alone until you have emptied yourself of yourself, by the side of the sepulchre. Holy Solitude!
All this I said to my friend, and he answered me, in a long letter, full of furious dismay, in these words:
“All that you say is good, very good. But don’t you think that instead of going in quest of the sepulchre of Don Quixote and redeeming it from the bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and dukes, we ought to go in quest of the sepulchre of God and rescue it from the atheists and deists who occupy it, and there, giving voice to our supreme despair and dissolving our heart in tears, wait for God to rise again and save us from nothingness?”
THE HELMET OF MAMBRINO
“Pray, good gentlemen,” said the barber,[2] “let us have your opinion in this matter. I suppose you will grant this same helmet to be a basin?” “He that dares grant any such thing,” said Don Quixote, “must know that he lies plainly, if he is a knight; but, if a squire, he lies abominably.”
That’s right, my lord Don Quixote, that’s right. It is courage, it is the barefaced courage that is ready to affirm a thing aloud and before all the world and to defend the affirmation of it to the death, it is courage that creates all truths. Things are so much the truer the more they are believed, and it is not intelligence but will that imposes them upon the world.
“Now I swear before you all,” said Don Quixote, “by the order of knighthood which I profess, that that is the same individual helmet which I won from him, without the least addition or diminution.” To which Sancho added, in timid support of his master: “That I will swear, for since my lord won it, he never fought but once in it, and that was the battle wherein he freed those ungracious galley-slaves, who by the same token would have knocked out his brains with a shower of stones, had not this same honest basin-helmet saved his skull.”
In “The Tragic Sense of Life” Unamuno says: “I wrote my Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho in opposition to the Cervantists and erudite persons, in order to make a living work of what was and still is for the majority a dead letter. What does it matter to me what Cervantes intended or did not intend to put into it and what he actually did put into it? What is living in it is what I myself discover in it, whether Cervantes put it there or not, what I myself put into and under and over it, and what we all put into it. I wanted to track down our philosophy in it.”