Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

Collaboration with the public, I say. For the public collaborates more or less ostensibly in the work of every publicist, sometimes with applause, sometimes with censure. I know that you have been influenced in your work by the letters which from time to time you receive from unknown readers, especially from those in America, and which have provided you with helpful notes and suggestions. But in addition to this, you are influenced, perhaps without knowing it, by the reaction of your readers, of those who follow your work, and this reaction affects what you write, forcing you sometimes to adapt yourself to your readers’ point of view, sometimes to combat it and endeavour to make it conform to yours.

It is said that some of the greatest dramas, among others those of Shakespeare, have been actually created on the stage, in collaboration with the public, having been modified at every representation according to the way in which the public received them. And do you not think that the successive works of a productive author are not very often merely successive editions, more or less revised, of one and the same work?

Every author who writes much repeats himself much; the more original he is and the more he draws from his own depths instead of merely echoing what he hears round about him, the more he repeats himself. The greatest geniuses have been men of few and simple ideas expressed with vigour and efficacy, but expressed also with more uniformity and continuity than those of writers of only average ability. There have been men whose greatness has been owing to the fact that they were men of one idea, men who were simply an idea incarnate. By dint of living one single but noble and fruitful idea, they have succeeded in presenting it to us in all its forms. Variety, multiplicity of points of view, almost always indicates a certain spiritual weakness. But I do not need to convince you of this, for I know how much you admire Athanasius for being a man of one idea.

Yes, your own works, in spite of their apparent variety—novels, commentaries, essays, poems—are, if you consider it carefully, simply the continuous development in multiple forms of but one and the same fundamental idea. And in thus seeking to communicate this central thought of yours, you go on condensing it more and more and discovering new forms of expression for it, until perhaps some day you will hit upon the most adequate, the most precise form. And, believe me, a writer achieves a lasting place when he has discovered the permanent form of any idea, when he has succeeded in giving it its definitive body. And in your effort to discover this, who shall say that this writing of fugitive and fragmentary pieces is not as useful as any other way of search? You know that very often one thinks more when talking than when meditating.

Do you remember that experience which occurred to you one afternoon when you were walking with your friend Vincent, that wise and subtle spirit, so unhappily cut off in his prime? You were arguing as usual; his subtle objections forced you to concentrate your mind, and after a quick reply to one of his questions, almost before the words were out of your mouth, you exclaimed delightedly: “How right that is! how exact! how precise!” And when he showed surprise that you should be astonished by one of your own remarks, you said: “The fact is, it is as new to me as it is to you. Doubtless the solution was already there in my mind, but it was dim and confused. I myself was not conscious of its being there. It was only in the effort to meet your objections that it took shape and disclosed itself to me. And so you see it was really as new to me as to you.”

And so it often happens. Thought depends upon language, for we think with words, and language is a social thing. Language is conversation. And thought itself is therefore social. The only clear thought is transmissible thought. If anyone tells you that he sees a thing quite clearly but that he does not know how to communicate it, you may reply that he cannot be sure whether he sees it clearly or not. To every writer it has happened more than once that he has realized the absurdity or obscurity of his own thought only after he has seen it in print.

Be assured, then, that you meditate more and meditate better when you are writing things like this letter that you are now addressing to yourself than when you shut yourself up in your room to devote yourself to what is called meditation and what is really only mind-wandering. The necessity of giving your thought transmissible expression is that which makes it a living and effective process. It is when your pen is in your hand that things occur to you most readily, and the reason is because then you are not thinking for yourself but thinking for others. Thinking for oneself is not properly thinking—it is losing oneself in vague reveries, like a man on the verge of sleep idly watching the drift of his cigar-smoke. To think is to think for others; thinking is a social function.

You have sometimes heard it said that Paul of Tarsus used to draw inspiration from his own words, that these words provoked ideas, and that in his epistles it is possible to follow this process of ideation by means of verbal associations. And of Augustine of Hippo—one of the immortal pillars, like Paul, Bernard and Martin Luther, of the Christianity of the heart—it has been said that he developed his theme by antitheses, that is to say rhetorically. And both Paul and Augustine were men of burning passion, not solitary contemplatives, but active fighters.

They consider you to be an egotist because you often refer to yourself—you are doing it now in this soliloquy—and talk about yourself, but the truth is that this self of yours, in so far as you are a writer, is something that belongs to all the world—you stand in the middle of the street, hailed by everybody and answering back. You would be not merely an egotist but a miserable egoist if you shut yourself up in the tower of ivory, far from your fellows, and worked day after day upon some minute and exquisite jewel. You work in the open air, in the public gaze, and from time to time, in order to keep your work clean, you blow away the dust of the turmoil that has settled upon it.

Enough. Let us talk no more together, you and I, this hidden and intimate self and this apparent and public self. Are they really two? Are you anything else but a writer? Or rather, this self that is not the publicist, of what worth is it?