Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

Will this work be efficacious? But did Don Quixote believe in the immediate and visible efficacy of his work? It is greatly to be doubted, and at any rate he did not risk putting the visor he had made to the test by giving it a second blow. And many passages in his history indicate that he did not believe much in the immediate success of his design to restore knight-errantry. And what did it matter so long as he himself thus lived and immortalized himself? And he must have surmised, and did in fact surmise, that his achievement would have another and a higher efficacy—namely, that it would go on working in the minds of all those who in the spirit of devotion read of his exploits.

Don Quixote made himself ridiculous, but did he perchance know the most tragic ridicule of all, the ridicule that is reflected in the eyes of a man’s own soul, the ridicule with which a man sees his own self? Transfer Don Quixote’s battlefield to his own soul; conceive him to be fighting in his soul to save the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, not to lose the treasure of his infancy; turn him into an inward Don Quixote—with his Sancho, a Sancho equally inward and equally heroical at his side—and then talk to me of the comic tragedy.

And what has Don Quixote left, do you ask? I answer that he has left himself, and a man, a living and eternal man, is worth all theories and all philosophies. Other peoples have left principally institutions, books—we have left souls. St. Teresa is worth any institution, any “Critique of Pure Reason.”

Don Quixote was converted? Yes, but only to die. But the other, the real Don Quixote, he who remained on earth and lives among us, breathing his spirit into us, this Don Quixote was never converted, this Don Quixote goes on inciting us to make ourselves ridiculous, this Don Quixote must never die. And the conversion of the other Don Quixote—he who was converted only to die—was possible because he was mad, and it was his madness, not his death or his conversion, that immortalized him and earned for him the forgiveness of the crime of having been born. Felix culpa! Neither was his madness cured but only transformed. His death was his last knightly adventure—in dying he stormed heaven, which suffereth violence.

This Don Quixote died and descended into hell, and he entered it lance on rest and freed all the condemned, as he freed the galley-slaves, and he shut the gates of hell, and tore down from them the scroll that Dante saw there, and replaced it by one on which was written “Long live hope!” and escorted by those whom he had freed, and they laughing at him, he went to heaven. And God laughed at him paternally and this divine laughter filled his soul with eternal happiness.

And the other Don Quixote remained here amongst us, fighting with desperation. Is not despair the mainspring of his fighting? How is it that among the words that English has borrowed from our tongue—siesta, camarilla, guerilla and the like—there occurs this word desperado? This inward Don Quixote that I spoke of, conscious of his own comicness, is he not a man of despair—desesperado? A desperado, yes, like Pizarro and like Loyola. But “despair is the master of impossibilities,” as Salazar y Torres tells us, and it is despair and despair alone from whence springs heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope. Spero quia absurdum, it ought to be said, rather than credo.

And Don Quixote, who lived solitary, sought more solitude still, sought the solitudes of the Peña Pobre in order that there, alone, without witnesses, he might plunge into yet wilder extravagances to the easing of his soul. Yet he was not quite solitary, for Sancho accompanied him, Sancho the good, Sancho the believing, Sancho the simple. If, as some say, in Spain Don Quixote is dead and Sancho lives, then we are saved, for Sancho, his master dead, will become a knight-errant himself. At any rate he is waiting for some other mad knight to follow yet again.

And there is also a tragedy of Sancho. The other Sancho, the Sancho who journeyed with the mortal Don Quixote—it does not appear certain that he died, although some say that he died hopelessly mad, calling for his lance, and believing that all those things which on his death-bed his converted master abominated as lies had been really true. But neither does it appear certain that the bachelor Sanson Carrasco, or the curate, or the barber, or the dukes and canons are dead, and it is with these that the heroic Sancho has to fight.

Don Quixote journeyed alone, alone with Sancho, alone with his solitude. And shall we not also journey alone, we his lovers creating for ourselves a quixotesque Spain which exists only in our imagination?

And again we shall be asked: What has Don Quixote bequeathed to Kultur? I answer: Quixotism, and that is no little thing. It is a whole method, a whole epistemology, a whole aesthetic, a whole logic, a whole ethic, above all a whole religion, that is to say, a whole economy of things human and divine, a whole hope in the rationally absurd.