Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

II

It appears to be the fact that many people believe me to be a man who lives shut up in a library, buried among books, isolated from the world. They say that I lack what they call the sense of reality. As for the first charge, that I spend my days devouring books, it is a pure fiction. I travel more than I wish to travel and I see more people than I wish to see. With regard to the second, my lack of the sense of reality—let us consider it.

That which men of the world—and in my speech and writings I always use this phrase in a sufficiently depreciatory sense—that which men of the world call the sense of reality appears to me to be no more than a sense of apparentiality. A man is said to possess the sense of reality who stops to consider only the transient surface of things and does not penetrate into their permanent substance.

Those who are said to possess this sense of reality are interested only in news, what is called the latest information. And as for me—I must say it perfectly frankly—I detest the latest information. There is nothing in the newspaper that strikes me as so empty as the page devoted to the latest news. This craving to have news, news usually lacking in any deep import, as quickly as possible, seems to me puerile. The important thing, I have always supposed, is to know things thoroughly, not to know them quickly.

But the current runs in the other direction. For one who reads a book with the sole purpose of knowing, enjoying and profiting by it, there are twenty who read it simply in order to say that they have read it and to gain kudos by quoting from it.

There are, or at any rate there ought to be, in each one of us two men, the temporal and the eternal, the one who is preoccupied with the cares of the passing day and the one who is preoccupied with the eternal preoccupations, the one who says: “What shall I eat, or how shall I amuse myself to-morrow?” and the one who says: “What will happen to us after death?” In some cases the inner man dominates and leads captive the external man and then the individual either retires to a monastery or he lives a life of resigned despair, ceaseless wrestling with mystery; and in some cases the external and temporal man subjugates and strangles the inner and eternal man, and then we have the man of the world, the man who boasts of being practical and of possessing the sense of reality. And this practical man does not interest me in the least.

When I find myself in a modern city, in one of these cities that are called progressive because of their system of police and hygiene, with smoothly paved streets, pretentious buildings, electric trams, luxurious motors replete with fashionably dressed women, well-kept parks, comfortable clubs, theatres—in short, complete with all the apparatus of a modern city—whenever I find myself in such a city I am enveloped, invaded and oppressed by a sense of profound and utter solitude. The men appear to me like shadows without substance. And like Diogenes I begin to look for a man, a real man, a man who wrestles with destiny and mystery, a man of religious spirit, a man, in short, who believes in God or denies Him, but who believes in Him or denies Him passionately, with the heart, not merely in virtue of some philosophical formula forming part of the general knowledge that a well-educated man is expected to possess.

I set about looking for a man ... and rarely, very rarely, do I find him. “The man you ought to know is López,” they tell me, “a man of culture and distinction.” And so, although without any illusion, and chiefly in order not to offend the friend who recommends him to me, I get to know López. And in effect López has read a great deal and knows the names of the most prominent writers and publicists and discusses Comte and Spencer and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and has read the latest French novelists, and knows several famous passages of poetry by heart and has his tincture of history, sociology, psychology and natural science, and López ... is not the man I am looking for.

It is not the great classic authors that López has read, the essential geniuses, the men who have gazed at the Sphinx face to face, but rather their expositors and commentators; he knows the great minds of all time as they are reflected in manuals of the history of philosophy or literature. Once perhaps, not so much even for curiosity’s sake as to be able to say that he has read them, he has looked into the book of Job or St. Augustine or Pascal or à Kempis, but his heart has not been touched. And naturally López does not interest me, does not even appear to me to be a man; he is simply a member of a club, or a member of Parliament, or a brilliant figure in polite society. His distinction is of the same category as that of his wife’s mediocre facility in playing the piano. López knows how to present himself to the best advantage.

But fortunately and thanks to God I do not live in one of these cities, which are all alike, all attempting to imitate Paris. I live in an ancient city, whose age is perpetual youth, whose golden stones distil memories. And even so, whenever I can I escape into the country and there I talk with some old shepherd who has brooded for long hours beneath the sky upon eternal themes. And this man who reads no newspapers, who does not know where Serbia is and has never heard of Dreyfus or Anatole France or the Kaiser, who knows nothing about the latest sociological theory or the latest fashion in morning coats, this man speaks to me the ancient words of the wisdom of Ecclesiastes. And as he has never read Ecclesiastes, but has derived his wisdom from the same fount, the ancient words come to me new, eternally new.