Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

It would seem, Miguel, that your audience will have to allow you, if only just for once, to talk aloud to yourself, to unburden your heart.—Do it now, and then it will be all the easier to do it again some other day.—Writing for the public is a harsh kind of slavery.

Doubtless you willed it. You chose to be a writer and you must patiently bear the consequences of your choice. But are we as free to choose our vocation as we think we are?

You crave retirement, tranquillity and silence in order that you may devote yourself to some solid and unhurried task, remote from the turmoil that deafens the ear with its noise and blinds the eye with its dust. Your heart with its yearning for solitude turns longingly towards those men of old who dedicated themselves to works that endure, far from the traffic of the world with its daily contentions and anxieties. You yearn for the classic, the eternally classic. But the vertigo of life sweeps you along and you find yourself involved in the burning dissensions of your contemporaries. You cannot live among the dead; you have to live among the living.

And yet, dear Miguel, what a source of consolation and strength is this intercourse with the glorious dead, whose works never die! How the soul is refreshed by the vivifying streams that flow from those immortal spirits who live their deepest lives in us—Homer, Plato, Virgil, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, and so many others!

Yes, there is no doubt about it—this insane eagerness to know what those round about us are saying or repeating hinders us from following the progress of the human soul as it reveals itself in its immortal sons, those erect pillars that are landmarks for all time. What does it matter to you, tell me, what your neighbour is clamouring about? You are not going to follow the example of those whose time and soul are so absorbed in listening to all the superficialities of their contemporaries that they have no time left to enjoy the enduring legacy of humanity. This form of modernity serves only to enfeeble both men and peoples. Distrust novelties, Miguel, and be sure that there is nothing more novel than what is for ever. Homer and Shakespeare are more modern than most of the living writers who are accounted most modern. You will learn more from Plato than from the author of the latest volume in Alcan’s Library of Modern Philosophy. The modern is the fashionable and you must fly from all fashions.

But it is useless—I know it—useless. I can see that the voices round about you, the ardent voices of the living, have caught your ear, perhaps in spite of yourself. It is the voice of humanity, and you are and ought to be before all else a man. Do you remember what your dead friend Coleridge, the wonderful Coleridge, says in his Biographia Literaria about his contemporaries? I will repeat it to you again:

“The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one who exists to receive it.”

Consider this same Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote these words and tell me if the memory of this man who died many years before you were born can give you that glow which the recollection of one still living gives you. And nevertheless, you will say, how sweet and peaceful it is to converse with those who once were and to-day sleep in the lap of the teeming earth.

You have dreamed of producing a magnum opus that would endure, and you find yourself condemned to the fragmentary and fugitive labour of journalism. Must you repine at that? We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.

And remember that the slowly and carefully elaborated work of the solitary author, holding himself aloof from all collaboration with his public, is perhaps after all only the monument of his own egoism.