Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

His present feeling was not the same, but it had something that resembled it. Had he written that? Was he the same person as the man who had written that? Did he contain within himself more than one person? Might it not be that he carried within him a whole legion of souls sleeping one below another? Were not all his ancestors sleeping somewhere in the limbo of his brain? Did others see him as he saw himself, or did they see him quite differently, and was he always actually doing and saying that which he thought he was?

This last idea, an absurd and extravagant idea, had obsessed him for some time past and it caused him anguish, for he said to himself: This is madness, this is sheer madness.

Only too often, in fact, as he walked quietly along the street, it had occurred to him to think something like this: “What if, instead of walking quietly and soberly, I were really pirouetting or making ridiculous contortions or behaving improperly? This hostility which I have remarked in certain of my acquaintance, may it not have arisen because I have said things to them which I am unaware of having said, or because when I thought I was offering them my hand I was in fact making some impudent or contemptuous gesture? When I imagine myself to be saying one thing, may it not be they hear something very different or perhaps contrary?”

This absurd obsession disquieted him, irritated him, made him doubt the sanity and vigour of his reason, and he had to exercise all the power of autosuggestion at his command to overcome it.

With a vigorous effort he threw off this obstinate vagary of his mind, but only to return to the question of the strangeness of what he had written.

Formerly, a long time ago, he had been a convinced determinist, unable to tolerate even the mention of free will, so irrational did the supposition of it seem to him. But later on, after further examination of the question, his inflexible determinist faith had broken down; and now, at the time at which we discover him, seated in his arm-chair in his study, he has put this question of determinism and free will away into the lumber-room of metaphysics from which he rarely takes it out. He believes now that science has not succeeded in putting this question in its true light, but that it always involves it in a petitio principii. But what he really does feel—he feels rather than thinks it—is that however free a man may be within himself, in so far as he has to exteriorize and manifest himself, to speak or to act, to communicate with his fellows, in so far as he has to avail himself of his body and of the bodies of others, he remains bound by the rigid laws of these bodies, he is a slave. My acts—he thinks—are never exclusively mine: if I speak I have to make use of air that is not mine in order to produce my voice; neither are my vocal cords, strictly speaking, mine; nor is the language mine which I must use if I wish to make myself understood; and the case is the same if I write, if I strike a blow, if I kiss, if I fight. And he asks himself in conclusion: “Am I myself really mine?” And so the tormenting obsession buzzes round him again.

There is something which we have incorporated and made our own and there is much that is completely alien to us; and between these two extreme terms everything is partly ours and partly not ours. Our life is a continual combat between our spirit which seeks to make itself master of the world, to make the world its own, to make the world it, and the world which in its turn seeks to possess itself of our spirit, to make our spirit its own. I wish to make the world mine—our man thinks—to make it myself, and the world tries to make me its, to make me it; I strive to personalize it and it strives to depersonalize me. And in this tragic combat—for yes, the combat is a tragic one—I have to make use of my enemy in order to dominate him, and my enemy has to make use of me in order to dominate me. Whatever I say, write or do, it is only with the world’s help that I can say, write or do it; and thus the world at once depersonalizes my saying, writing and doing and makes them its own, and I appear to be different from what I am.

What an unhappy necessity is that of writing! What woeful constraint is that of having to talk! Between any two who talk together, language mediates, the world mediates, that which is neither one nor the other of the interlocutors mediates; they are involved in this intrusive element which, while enabling them to communicate, separates them. If it were only possible to create language in the very act of speaking our thought!...

Undoubtedly speech is a more perfect medium than writing, because it is less material: the vibrations of the air are dissipated, while the trace of the ink remains. Undoubtedly the flatus vocis, like everything fugitive, is richer in association, more complete in orchestration, while writing, like everything concrete, remains detached. But better still if pure thought could communicate itself by means only of those vague and fluid words upon which it floats within the soul! To make oneself understood in words or writing is to communicate the accidents, not the substance, of thought.

Our man looks at the clouds in the western sky, combed out by the unseen comb of the wind, and watches them turn to flame in the light of the setting sun. And he thinks of the substantial communion of spirits, communication by the act of spiritual presence alone. He remembered how once, on hearing some old ballad sung by a shepherd boy, the sound of which had come to him faintly through a leafy screen of grey oaks, he had trembled and felt as if he heard voices from another world, not from another world beyond this world, but from a world that lives within the world we know—voices which seemed to issue from the very heart of things, as if they were the song of the soul of the oaks, of the clouds, of the pebbles of the stream, of the earth and of the sky. Where had he heard that song before?