Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

Yes, I know it—I am not sympathetic to all those who read me, perhaps not even to the majority of them. But what I am to do?... So long as they go on reading me.... For the fact is I would rather that they should find me not sympathetic and nevertheless go on reading me than that they should find me sympathetic and cease to read me. Sympathy is often purchased at the cost of authority and respect. I confess that the quality of being sympathetic does not appear to me to be a very desirable thing in a writer. It is perhaps the beginning of discredit, a discredit that is none the less profound because it wears a gilded disguise.

Yes, I know that I am not sympathetic, that I have perhaps succeeded in making myself antipathetic to many of those who read me and who in spite of this antipathy—or rather because of it—still continue to read me.

A short time ago a friend wrote to me saying that although he often disagrees with me he reads me because his reaction to my opinions stimulates ideas in him. I profess myself well content with this, to beget ideas in those who read me, although these ideas should be the contrary of those which I expound and defend.

But there are many, very many readers who don’t like being obliged to think and who only want to be told what they already know, what they have already thought. In order to become sympathetic a writer has only to flatter and confirm his readers’ preconceptions, clinching the commonplaces to which their minds have given assent. That is the way for a writer to become sympathetic and it is also the way for him to become soon tedious, so that the reader remarks: “Ah, yes, a very sympathetic writer, very understanding!” and ceases to read him.

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.