Essays and soliloquies

by Miguel de Unamuno

The setting of the sun in these immense solitudes is full of beauty. The sun dilates as it touches the horizon as if greedy to enjoy still more of the earth and in sinking it sheds its light upon it like blood and fills the sky with a dust of gold. The infinite dome of the sky grows paler and paler, then swiftly darkens, and the fleeting twilight is followed by the profundity of a night tremulous with stars. Here are no northern twilights, long, soft and languorous.

Broad is Castile! And beautiful with a sad quiet beauty this sea of stone beneath its expanse of sky. It is a landscape uniform and monotonous in its contrasts of light and shade, in its sharply juxtaposed and unmodulated colours. It presents the appearance of an immense floor of mosaic, without variety of design, above which is spread out a sky of intensest blue. It is lacking in gentle transitions and its only harmonic continuity is that of the immense plain and the massed blue which overspreads and illumines it.

It is a landscape that awakens no voluptuous sensations of joie de vivre, that inspires no longings for ease and idleness. Here are no lush green meadows inviting indolent repose, no dells that beckon like nests.

Its contemplation does not call forth the sleeping animal in us, the animal that delights to drowse in a leafy paradise, brooding over the remembered satisfactions of those appetites which have been kneaded into the flesh since the earliest dawn of life.

Nature does not here recreate the spirit. Rather it detaches us from the low earth and enfolds us in the pure naked unvarying sky. Here there is no communion with nature, no absorption in her exuberant splendours. This infinite landscape is, if it may be so said, nonotheistic rather than pantheistic. Man is not lost in it so much as diminished by it, and in its immense drought he is made aware of the aridity of his own soul.

The population of the Castilian country-side is concentrated for the most part in hamlets, villages or towns, in groups of clustered dwelling-houses, separated from one another by immense and naked solitudes. The villages are compact and sharply delimited, not melting away into the plain in a surrounding fringe of isolated homesteads, the intervening country being entirely unpopulated. The houses seem to crowd together round the church as if for warmth or for defence against the rigour of nature, as if the inhabitants sought a second cloak in which to isolate themselves from the cruelty of the climate and the melancholy of the landscape. Thus it is that very often the villagers have to journey considerable distances on mule-back in order to reach the fields where they work, one here, another there, in isolation, and it is already dark before they return to their homes to stretch themselves on the hard kitchen settles and sleep the comforting sleep of toil. A notable sight it is to see them at nightfall, mounted on their mules, their figures silhouetted against the pale sky, their sad, slow, monotonous songs dying away on the sharp night air into the infinity of the furrowed plain.

While the men labour in the sweat of their brow on the hard land, the womenfolk perform their tasks at home, filling the sunny arcades in front of the houses with a murmur of voices. In the long winter evenings it is usual for masters and serving-folk to assemble together, while the latter dance to the accompaniment of the sharp dry tap of the tambourine or sometimes to an old ballad measure.

Go into one of these villages or drowsing cities of the plain, where life flows slowly and calmly in a monotonous procession of hours, and there you will find the living souls beneath whose transitory existence lies the eternal essence out of which is woven the inner history of Castile.

Within these towns and villages lives a breed of men of a dry, hard and sinewy constitution, burned by the sun and inured by the cold, a sober, frugal breed, the product of a long process of natural selection by searching winter frosts and intermittent periods of scarcity, tempered to withstand the inclemency of the skies and the asperities of penury. The peasant who gave you a grave “Good day” as he passed by on his mule, huddled in his cloak, will receive you without overmuch courtesy, with a kind of restrained sobriety. He is collected in his movements, circumspect and deliberate in his conversation, with a gravity which gives him the air of a dethroned king. Such at any rate he appears when he is not cunningly ironical. This sly biting irony—socarronería, a racy word full of racy character—is the classical form of Castilian humour, a quiet and circumspect humour, sententious and phlegmatic, the humour of Sanson Carrasco in Don Quixote and of Quevedo, he who wrote the discourses of Marcus Brutus.

His slowness is matched by his tenacity, qualities that have an intimate association. His reaction-interval, as the psycho-physiologists would express it, is long; it takes him a considerable time to realize an impression or an idea, but once he has grasped it he does not readily relinquish it, does not in fact relinquish it until another has impinged upon it and driven it out. The slowness and tenacity of his impressions would appear to be due to the lack of an environing and unifying nimbus, blending them into a conjunctive whole; they do not merge into one another by subtle gradations, but each one disappears completely before the next takes its place. They seem to follow one another like the succession of uniform and monotonous tones in the landscape of his country, sharp edge against sharp edge.