Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

This dream of stone enters into the soul and sinks into it, into the innermost depths of it, into the soul’s soul, into what is innermost in the soul itself, and it bears our soul along with it into the underlying substance of all souls, fugitive waves submerged in the sea of souls. Is it a sea? Is it liquid? Is it not rather a rocky floor, a plain, a stony stratum of many mansions for civil human thought to dwell in? And is not each one of our souls a stone which life hews—hews with hammer-strokes of sorrow and joy, of hate and love, of memory and hope—so that it may fit into the great civil, human cathedral, in the temple of our civil and human God?

It was but yesterday, but a moment ago, that is to say it was five and twenty years ago—the third of a full lifetime—that I first saw you, tower of Monterrey, and you carry me beyond, far beyond, those twenty-five years, back to when, before ever I was born, I beheld you—where?—and in beholding you, you carry me from the midst of these twenty-five years, beyond, far beyond, to when, after I am dead and dead indeed, I shall go on beholding you—this vision of you which in the clarified frosty light is imprinted on my soul will abide with me, at rest and buried deep in the sea of souls. Dream abides. It is the only thing that abides; vision abides.

Spirit, when it suffers or rejoices, when it hates or loves, when it remembers or hopes, becomes earth, becomes water, becomes fire or becomes air; and stone, when it thinks and thinks civilly, becomes abiding spirit, congealed, crystallized, substantivated. This tower is a diamond of spirit.

And what does it say? It says nothing that is not itself; it says itself, it proclaims itself immortal, it affirms itself. No matter if an earthquake or a bombardment—which is another earthquake—or any other accident that the hate of Nature or of man may bring about, throws you to the ground and scatters your stones in confusion, tower of Monterrey, for the vision of you will remain. It will remain fused in the souls which behold you.

And to the soul that beholds you, tower of Monterrey, you say that he says the utmost that can be said who says himself, who expresses his person, who strips his spirit naked in the icy-clear light of the civil world, standing statue-like before the world of men. The greatest thing that men can see is another man, and if they but once saw him utterly and completely, they would carry him with them for ever.

And this tower and other towers fill our soul with the tormenting longing to say the unsayable, to leave in words that are borne on wings of sound and pass away and are lost, something that does not pass away and is never lost. To say what one sees and to say it so that it is seen in being heard; to see what is heard: that is the whole secret of Art. Art makes the blind to see—and many are blind whose eyes reflect the images of what they see upon the mind—and it makes them see with the word; Art makes the deaf to hear—and many are deaf whose ears vibrate with the sounds they hear round about them—and it makes them hear with the vision. A poem gives sight to the blind; a picture gives hearing to the deaf. Art fuses the senses, descending to that which unites them in a common root and ascending to that which also unites them in a common crown.

Tower of Monterrey, not the tower which I see with my eyes when I go forth from my house on these benumbing mornings of clarified light to read the divine Plato with my pupils—O noble word degraded to so ignoble use!—my tower of Monterrey, the tower that I carry in the crystal of my mind, as if it were a vision which by some enchantment had remained frozen for ever upon the frozen surface of a lake, this tower of mine tells me that he who says himself remains for ever too. It matters not, my soul, what you say if you say yourself. For what art thou but a phrase in the thought of God?

The thought of God is History: human history, civil history, the history of this civil humanity in which God became man and dwelt among men, and proclaimed that His kingdom, the kingdom of God, that is, the kingdom of Man, the kingdom of God-Man, is not of this world of sorrows and joys, of hates and loves, of memories and hopes. For the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Man, is of thought, which is above sorrow and joy, above hate and love, above memory and hope, although it is made of these, as the towers that abide in History are made of stones. The thought of God is History; History is what God thinks, what He goes on thinking. And he who lives in History, more or less audible and visible, whatever the fashion of his life, however far beneath the surface, lives in the thought of God, and, abiding in God’s thought, he abides in God. And everyone who, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly, helps to make History, lives in History; everyone, however obscurely and hesitatingly he lives, who has civil consciousness. Absolute death is unconsciousness.

And this my tower of Monterrey speaks to me of our Renaissance, of the Spanish renaissance, of the eternal essence of Spain, and tells me to say my Spanish self and to affirm that if life is dream, dream is the only thing that abides, and that the rest, all that is not dream, is nothing but a process of digestion that passes away, as sorrow and joy, hate and love, memory and hope, pass away. Yes, life without dream is nothing but digestion and respiration, breath that vanishes. Breath, air, pneuma, anima, spiritus, such are the names that have been given to the life that animates the body but is not dream; and the breath passes away, but the dream abides.

“Life is dream!” affirmed the man, the Spaniard, who believed in the eternal and the substantial, and those who do not believe in it say in the foolishness of their hearts: “Life is breath!” And the tower of Monterrey, my tower of Monterrey, my tower of the Spanish renaissance, of renaissant Spanishness, tells me that life is not breath that passes away and is lost, but dream that abides and triumphs.