Chapter II (1)

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.

Many times I have wished in my secret heart that I had lived in one of those ages of burning faith, among a people consumed by an infinite passion, among the Crusaders or among the Albigenses, in the ranks of Cromwell’s Ironsides or of Coligny’s Huguenots, or in the obscurity of the monastery in which Heinrich Seuss underwent his tremendous mortifications.... But who in God’s name, if he be a man and a real man, can stand one of those banquets with which the friends of the distinguished López celebrate the honour of his being appointed governor of a province, with their interminable toasts, all full of the same empty platitudes, pronounced to the hateful accompaniment of the popping of champagne corks? When the unavoidable exigencies of social servitude compel me to attend one of these ceremonies of homage, I feel a desire to get up and say: “Brothers, let us meditate upon death!” and launch forth into a sermon. I don’t do so, of course, though not for fear of ridicule, but because I know that it would avail nothing.

* * * * *

But enough of unbosoming myself. You needn’t be afraid, I know that I am a slave, I know that we are all slaves.... I will return to the beaten track, I will return to “objective” themes, but.... But must my heart never be allowed the relief of a sigh, a sigh at once of resignation and rebellion? Must I not be allowed some time to say that all this that you call civilization appears to me to be nothing but the trappings of culture and that those who are content merely with the trappings are savages muffled in royal robes, and that the splendour of your metropolises leaves me cold?

MY RELIGION

A friend writing to me from Chile tells me that he has met people acquainted with my writings who have asked him: “What, in a word, is the religion of this Señor Unamuno?” I myself have several times been asked a similar question. And I am going to see if I cannot--I will not say, answer it, for that is a thing I do not pretend to be able to do, but endeavour at any rate to elucidate the meaning of the question.

Individuals as well as peoples characterized by intellectual inertia--and intellectual inertia is quite compatible with great productive activity in the sphere of economics and in other kindred spheres--tend to dogmatism, whether they know it or not, whether they wish it or not, whether they intend it or not. Intellectual inertia shuns the critical or sceptical attitude.

I say sceptical, taking the word scepticism in its etymological and philosophical sense, for the sceptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found. The one is the man who studies a problem and the other is the man who gives us a formula, correct or incorrect, as the solution of it.

In the order of pure philosophical speculation it is premature to demand that an investigator shall produce a definite solution of a problem while he is engaged in defining the problem itself more exactly. When a long calculation does not work out correctly, it is no small step forward to rub it all out and begin afresh. When a house threatens to collapse or becomes completely uninhabitable, the first thing to do is to pull it down and not to demand that another shall be built on top of it. The new house may indeed be built with materials taken from the old one, but only after the old one has first been demolished. In the meantime, if there is no other house available, the people can find shelter in a hut or sleep in the open.

And it is necessary not to lose sight of the fact that in the problems of practical life we must seldom expect to find definite scientific solutions. Men live and always have lived upon hazardous hypotheses and explanations, and sometimes even without them. Men have not waited to agree as to whether or not the criminal was possessed of free will before punishing him, and a man does not pause before sneezing to reflect upon the possible injury that may be caused by the obstructing particle that provokes him to sneeze.

I think that those men are mistaken who assert that they would live evilly if they did not believe in the eternal pains of hell, and the mistake is all to their credit. If they ceased to believe in a sanction after death, they would not live worse, but they would look for some other ideal justification for their conduct. The good man is not good because he believes in a transcendental order, but rather he believes in it because he is good--a proposition which I am sure must appear obscure or involved to those inquirers who suffer from intellectual inertia.

I am asked, then: “What is your religion?” And I will reply: My religion is to seek truth in life and life in truth, even though knowing full well that I shall never find them so long as I live; my religion is to wrestle unceasingly and unwearyingly with mystery; my religion is to wrestle with God from nightfall until the breaking of the day, as Jacob is said to have wrestled with Him. I cannot accommodate myself to the doctrine of the Unknowable or to that of “thus far and no farther.” I reject the everlasting _Ignorabimus_. And at all hazards I seek to scale the unattainable.

“Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” Christ said to us, and such an ideal of perfection is, without doubt, unattainable. But He put the unattainable before us as the goal and term of our endeavours. And He attained to it, say the theologians, by grace. And I wish to fight my fight careless of victory. Are there not armies and even peoples who march to certain defeat? Do we not praise those who die fighting rather than surrender? This, then, is my religion.

Those who put this question to me want me to give them a dogma, a solution which they can accept without disturbing their mental inertia. Or rather it is not this that they want, so much as to be able to label me and put me into one of the divisions in which they classify minds, so that they can say of me: He is a Lutheran, a Calvanist, a Catholic, an atheist, a rationalist, a mystic, or any other of those nicknames whose exact meaning they do not understand but which dispense them from further thinking. And I do not wish to have myself labelled, for I, Miguel de Unamuno, like every other man who aspires to full consciousness, am a unique species. “There are no diseases, but only persons who are diseased,” some doctors say, and I say that there are no opinions, but only opining persons.

In religion there is but little that is capable of rational resolution, and as I do not possess that little I cannot communicate it logically, for only the rational is logical and transmissible. I have, it is true, so far as my affections, my heart and my feelings are concerned, a strong bent towards Christianity, but without adhering to the special dogmas of this or that Christian confession. I count every man a Christian who invokes the name of Christ with respect and love, and I am repelled by the orthodox, whether Catholic or Protestant--the latter being usually as intransigent as the former--who deny the Christianity of those who interpret the Gospel differently from themselves. I know a Protestant Christian who denies that Unitarians are Christians.

I frankly confess that the supposed rational proofs--ontological, cosmological, ethical, etc.--of the existence of God, prove to me nothing; that all the reasons adduced to show that a God exists appear to me to be based on sophistry and begging of the question. In this I am with Kant. And in discussions of this kind, I feel that I am unable to talk to cobblers in the terms of their craft.

Nobody has succeeded in convincing me rationally of the existence of God, nor yet of His non-existence; the arguments of atheists appear to me even more superficial and futile than those of their opponents. And if I believe in God, or at least believe that I believe in Him, it is, first of all, because I wish that God may exist, and then, because He is revealed to me, through the channel of the heart, in the Gospel and in Christ and in history. It is an affair of the heart.

Which means that I am not convinced of it as I am of the fact that two and two make four.

If it were a question of something that did not touch my peace of conscience or console me for having been born, perhaps I should pay no heed to the problem; but as it involves my whole interior life and the spring of all my actions, I cannot quiet myself by saying: I do not know nor can I know. I do not know, that is certain; perhaps I can never know. But I want to know. I want to, and that is enough.

And I shall spend my life wrestling with mystery, and even without hope of penetrating it, for this wrestling is my sustenance and my consolation. Yes, my consolation. I have accustomed myself to wrest hope from despair itself. And let not fools in their superficiality shriek: Paradox!

I cannot conceive of a man of culture without this preoccupation, and in point of culture--and culture is not the same as civilization--I can hope but little from those who live without interest in the metaphysical aspect of the religious problem, and only study it in its social or political aspects. I can hope but very little for the enrichment of the spiritual treasury of mankind from those men or from those peoples who, whether it be from intellectual inertia, or from superficiality, or from scientificism, or from any other cause, are unmoved by the great and eternal disquietudes of the heart. I can hope nothing from those who say: “We must not think about these things!” I can hope even less from those who believe in a heaven and a hell such as those which we believed in when we were children; and still less can I hope from those who affirm with a fool’s gravity: “All this is but myth and fable; he who dies is buried and there’s an end of it.” I can hope for something only from those who do not know, but who are not resigned not to know; from those who fight unrestingly for the truth and put their life in the fight itself rather than in the victory.

The greater part of my work has always been to disquiet my neighbours, to rob them of heart’s ease, to vex them if I can. I have said this already in my commentary upon “The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho,” in which I have confessed myself most fully. Let them seek as I seek, let them wrestle as I wrestle, and between us all we will tear some shred of secret from God, and at any rate this wrestling will make us more men, men of more spirit.

In order to accomplish this work--a religious work--among peoples like those that speak the Castilian tongue who suffer from intellectual inertia and superficiality, slumbering in the routine of Catholic dogma or in the dogmatism of free-thought or of scientificism, it has been necessary for me to appear sometimes shameless and indecorous, at other times harsh and aggressive, and not a few times perverse and paradoxical. In our pusillanimous literature it was a rare thing to hear anyone cry out from the depths of his heart, to get excited, to exclaim. The shout was almost unknown. Writers were frightened of making themselves ridiculous. They behaved and still behave like those who put up with an affront in the street for fear of the ridicule of being seen with their hat on the ground marched off by the police. But I, no! When I have felt like shouting I have shouted. Never have I been restrained by decorum. And this is one of the things for which I have never been forgiven by my colleagues of the pen, so discreet, so correct, so disciplined, even when they preach indiscretion and indiscipline. Literary anarchists are more punctilious about style and syntax than about anything else. And when they play out of tune they do so tunefully; their discords resolve themselves into harmonies.

When I have felt a pain I have shouted and shouted in public. The psalms which are to be found in my _Poesías_ are simply the cries from the heart with which I have sought to make the heart-strings of the wounded hearts of others vibrate. If they have no heart-strings or only heart-strings that are too rigid to vibrate, then my cry will awaken no echo in them and they will declare that it is not poetry and they will proceed to investigate its acoustic properties. It is possible also to study acoustically the cry that is torn from the heart of a man who sees his son suddenly fall down dead--and he who has neither heart nor sons will understand no more of it than the acoustics.

These psalms, together with various other pieces in my _Poesías_, are my religion, a religion that I have sung, not expressed in logic and reasoning. And I sing it as best I can, with the voice and ear that God has given me, because I cannot reason it. And he to whom my verses appear to be more full of reasoning and logic and method and exegesis than of life, because they are not peopled with fauns, dryads, satyrs and the like or garbed in the latest modernist fashion, had better leave them alone, for it is evident that I shall not touch his heart whether I use a violin bow or a hammer.

What I fly from, I repeat, as from the plague, is any kind of classification of myself, and when I die I hope I shall still hear these intellectual sluggards inquiring: “And this gentleman, what is he?” Liberal or progressive fools will take me for a reactionary and perhaps for a mystic, without understanding of course what they may mean; and conservative and reactionary fools will take me for a kind of spiritual anarchist; and both of them will pity me as an unfortunate gentleman anxious to distinguish himself by singularity, hoping to be reputed an original, and with a bonnet full of bees. But no one need worry about what fools think of him, be they progressive or conservative, liberal or reactionary.

And since man is naturally intractable, and does not habitually thirst for the truth, and after being preached at for four hours usually returns to all his inveterate habits, these busy inquirers, if they chance to read this, will return to me with the question: “Well, but what solutions do you offer?” And I will tell them, once and for all, that if it is solutions they want, they can go to the shop opposite, for I do not deal in the article. My earnest desire has been, is and will be that those who read me should think and meditate on fundamental things, and it has never been to furnish them with thoughts ready made. I have always sought to agitate and to suggest rather than to instruct. It is not bread that I sell, not bread, but yeast, ferment.

I have friends, and good friends, who advise me to abandon this task and to concentrate upon what they call some objective work, something which will be, so they express it, definitive, something constructive, something that will last. They mean something dogmatic. I declare that I am incapable of it, and I claim my liberty, my holy liberty, even, if need be, the liberty of contradicting myself. I do not know whether anything that I have written or may write in the future is destined to live for years and centuries after I am dead; but I know that if anyone agitates the surface of a shoreless sea the waves will go radiating without end, even though at last they dwindle into ripples. To agitate is something. And if thanks to this agitation another who comes after me shall create something that will live, then my work will live in his.

It is a work of supreme mercy to awaken the sleeper and to shake the sluggard, and it is a work of supreme religious piety to seek truth in everything and to expose fraud, stupidity and ignorance wherever they are to be found.

SOLITUDE

It is my love for the multitude that makes me fly from them. In flying from them, I go on seeking them. Do not call me a misanthrope. Misanthropes seek society and intercourse with people; they need them in order to feed their hatred and disdain of them. Love can live upon memories and hopes; hate needs present realities.

Let me, then, fly from society and take refuge in the quiet of the country, seeking in the heart of it and within my own soul the company of people.

Men only feel themselves really brothers when they hear one another in the silence of things in the midst of solitude. The hushed moan of your neighbour which reaches you through the wall that separates you penetrates much more deeply into your heart than would all his laments if he told you them to your face. I shall never forget a night that I once spent at a watering-place, during the whole of which I was kept awake by a very faint intermittent moaning--a moaning that seemed to wish to stifle itself in order not to awaken those who were asleep, a discreet and gentle moaning that came to me from the neighbouring bedroom. That moaning, which came from I know not whom, had lost all personality; it produced upon me the illusion of coming out of the silence of the night itself, as if it were the silence or the night that lamented, and there was even a moment when I dreamt that that gentle lament rose to the surface from the depths of my own soul.

I left the following day without having sought to ascertain who was the sufferer or why he suffered. And I believe that I have never felt so much pity for any other man.

It is only solitude that dissolves that thick cloak of shame that isolates us from one another; only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude. Solitude unites us, believe me, just as much as society separates us. And if we do not know how to love one another, it is because we do not know how to be alone.

It is only in solitude, when it has broken the thick crust of shame that separates us from one another and separates us all from God, that we have no secrets from God; only in solitude do we raise our heart to the Heart of the Universe; only in solitude does the redeeming hymn of supreme confession issue from our soul.

There is no other real dialogue than the dialogue that you hold with yourself, and you can hold this dialogue only when you are alone. In solitude and only in solitude can you know yourself as a neighbour; and so long as you do not know yourself as a neighbour, you can never hope to see in your neighbours other I’s. If you want to learn to love others, withdraw into yourself.

* * * * *

I am accused of not caring about or being interested in the anxieties of men. It is just the contrary. I am convinced that there is no more than one anxiety, one and the same for all men, and never do I feel it or understand it more deeply than when I am alone. Each day I believe less and less in the social question, and in the political question, and in the æsthetic question, and in the moral question, and in the religious question, and in all the other questions that people have invented in order that they shall not have to face resolutely the only real question that exists--the human question, which is mine, yours, his, everyone’s.

And as I know that you will say that I am playing with words and that you will ask me what I mean by this human question, I shall have to repeat it once again: The human question is the question of knowing what is to become of my consciousness, of yours, of his, of everyone’s, after each one of us has died. So long as we are not facing this question, all that we are doing is simply making a noise so that we shall not hear it. And that is why we fear solitude so much and seek the company of one another.

* * * * *

The greatest thing that there is among men is a poet, a lyric poet, that is to say a real poet. A poet is a man who keeps no secrets from God in his heart, and who, in singing his griefs, his fears, his hopes and his memories, purifies and purges them from all falsehood. His songs are your songs, are my songs.

Have you ever heard any deeper, any more intimate, any more enduring poetry than that of the Psalms? And the Psalms are meant for singing alone. I know that they are sung by crowds, assembled together under the same roof in religious services; but in singing them the crowd ceases to be a crowd. In singing the Psalms, each one withdraws into himself and the voices of others echo in his ears simply as the consonance and reinforcement of his own voice.

And I observe this difference between a crowd assembled together to sing the Psalms and a crowd assembled to see a drama or to hear an orator: it is that the former is a real society, a company of living souls, in which each one exists and subsists by himself, while the other is a formless mass and each one of those who compose it no more than a fragment of the human herd.

I have never felt any desire to move a crowd, to exercise influence upon a mass of people--who lose their personality in being massed together--and on the other hand I have always felt a furious desire to perturb the heart of each individual man, to exercise an influence upon each one of my brothers in humanity. Whenever I have spoken in public I have almost always succeeded in employing a kind of lyrical oratory, and I have endeavoured to force upon myself the illusion that I was speaking to only one of my hearers, to any one, no matter which, to each one, not to all of them _en masse_.

* * * * *

We men are impenetrable. Spirits, like solid bodies, can only communicate with one another by the contact of surfaces, not by penetrating one another, still less by fusing together.

You have heard me say a thousand times that most spirits seem to me like crustaceans, with the bone outside and the flesh inside. And when in some book that I have forgotten I read what a painful and terrible thing it would be if the human spirit were to be incarnated in a crab and had to make use of the crab’s senses, organs and members, I said to myself: “This is what actually happens; we are all unfortunate crabs, shut up in hard shells.”

And the poet is he whose flesh emerges from the shell, whose soul oozes forth. And when, in our hours of anguish or joy, our soul oozes forth, we are all of us poets.

And that is why I believe that it is necessary to agitate the masses, to shake men and winnow them as in a sieve, to throw against one another, in order to see if in this way their shells will not break and their spirits flow forth, whether they will not mingle and unite with one another, and whether the real collective spirit, the soul of humanity, may not thus be welded together.

But the sad thing is, if we are to go by past experience, that all these mutual rubbings and clashings, far from breaking the shells, harden, thicken and enlarge them. They are like corns that grow larger and stronger with rubbing. Although perhaps it is that the clashes are not violent enough. And in any case it must be clashing, not rubbing. I do not like to rub against people but to clash against them; I do not like to approach people obliquely and glance off them at a tangent, but to meet them frontally, and if possible split them in two. It is the best service I can do them. And there is no better preparation for this task than solitude.

It is very sad that we have to communicate with one another by touching, at most by rubbing, through the medium of the hard shells that isolate us from one another. And I am convinced that this hard shell becomes weaker and more delicate, in solitude, until it changes into the most tenuous membrane which permits of the action of osmosis and exosmosis. And that is why I believe that it is solitude that makes men really sociable and human.

* * * * *

There are two kinds of union: one by removing differences, separating the elements that differentiate from those that unite, the other by fusion, bringing these differences into agreement. If we take away from the mind of each man that which is his own, that way of looking at things that is peculiar to him, everything that he takes care to hide for fear people should think him mad, we are left with that which he has in common with everyone else, and this common element gives us that wretched thing that is called common sense and which is nothing more than the abstract of the practical intelligence. But if we fuse into one the differing judgments of people, with all that they jealously preserve, and bring their caprices, their oddities, their singularities into agreement, we shall have human sense, which, in those who are rich in it, is not common but private sense.

The best that occurs to men is that which occurs to them when they are alone, that which they dare not confess, not only not to their neighbour but very often not even to themselves, that which they fly from, that which they imprison within themselves while it is in a state of pure thought and before it can flower into words. And the solitary is usually daring enough to express this, to allow it to flower, and so it comes about that he speaks that which others think in solitude by themselves and which nobody dares to publish. The solitary thinks everything aloud, and surprises others by saying that which they think beneath their breath, while they seek to deceive one another by pretending to make them believe that they are thinking something else, but without anybody believing them.

All this will help you to deduce for yourself in what way and to what extent solitude is the great school of sociability, and how right it is that we should sometimes withdraw ourselves from men in order that we may the better serve them.

INTELLECTUALITY AND SPIRITUALITY

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
_Hamlet_, Act I, Scene V.

For some days he had been spiritually restless. His sterile mind flitted hither and thither like a butterfly. Nothing succeeded in interesting him. He picked up a book, read two or three pages and then had to close it again, unable to control his wandering attention. He tried to write, but half of the sheets that he wrote he tore up. And yet he had never enjoyed better health, never felt the blood coursing more vigorously through his veins, or the heart and lungs working in better unison. At the same time he had a premonition of something strong and mature within himself striving to come to birth; he felt that he was on the verge of bringing forth thoughts brimful of vitality and splendour. But something, a kind of solemn calm, against which he contended in vain, encompassed and paralysed him. It was no doubt sheer insensibility in him not to wait in peace for the grace of the Spirit to visit him but to seek to force it with violence.

At last, one afternoon, when the light of the setting sun was pouring upon the wide balcony of his cell-like room, he shut himself up in it, with its dumb books, with all its familiar objects the sight of which was always grateful to him. It was like shutting himself up within himself, or even better than that, for this wonted ambience served him as a means of communion with the world. That square glass inkstand, those fat pen-holders, that carpet, that stout leather arm-chair in which his body rested while his mind went galloping away, those rough plain chairs, those rows of books against the white naked walls: all these things were a kind of prolongation of his spirit and at the same time they were like arms which the world stretched out to enfold him in. They belonged to him and yet they belonged also to the world; they were himself and at the same they were the not-himself. They would not deceive him, no. He had touched them once and a thousand times and every touch had linked itself with all the other touches, until at last these things of humble use had become invested with a kind of soul made up of the outpourings of spirit and memories.

He had books that were like lovers, grateful, remembering, for whenever he opened them at random they opened themselves of their own accord at the same place, always offering him the same passage, the choicest, the most intense, the most life-giving that they had to offer. And when he read the passage over again, the intimate ambience of the peaceful room yielded up the memory of all the other fugitive moments when he had read it before, and his soul vibrated across the gulf of time until its vibrations were lost in that remoteness of the past where consciousness loses itself too.

From the balcony of his room, across red roofs stained here and there with the green of lichen, he could just glimpse the clouds glowing in the sunset light. And nearer at hand, along the eaves of the roof opposite, the white stone-crop blossomed, its tiny flowerets nourishing their life upon the moist earthy sediment washed down by the rain from the sun-baked clay tiles and deposited in the guttering. In summer, pigeons flew down from the neighbouring belfry to bill and coo upon the roof, picking the seeds of the stone-crop at its edge, while the dark swifts skimmed through the air above. Sometimes cats crept stealthily with sinuous movement across the tiles. Upon this roof too his eyes had often rested; the little wild garden in the gutter, the pigeons, the swifts, the cats, these too belonged to him and at the same time to the world; and often while he had held them in his gaze his mind had been intent upon his innermost thoughts.

He shut himself up there in his study, like an oyster in its shell. He untethered his mind, letting it roam at will, without spur or bridle. For a time it wandered up and down, plucking at passing ideas, ranging over the backs of the books and divining famous names and titles of renown. Then it collected itself and withdrew into the body that it animated and made use of, and presently the arm of this body reached out for a sheet of paper and the eyes glanced over it.

It was the strident manifesto that had been so much talked about; it was the famous composition into which he, he himself, who was now sitting at ease in his cow-hide arm-chair, had emptied his spirit. He began to read it, and as he read it a strange disquiet invaded him. No, that was not his, that was not what he had thought and believed, that was not what he had written. And yet there could be no doubt about it. That, that which now seemed so strange to him, he had written that, and it had increased his fame. He read it over again.

No, we do not communicate what we want to communicate, he reflected. No sooner does a thought incarnate itself in words and issue forth into the world than it belongs to someone not ourself, or rather it belongs to nobody because it belongs to everybody. The flesh with which language clothes itself is communal and external; it wizens up thought, it imprisons it and even reverses and falsifies it.

It was a singular and disturbing effect that was produced in him by reading himself as if he were a stranger, as if his writing had been written by someone else. This effect of the duplication of his personality reminded him of a former experience of self-duplication which he never recalled without a shudder. Once when gazing at the reflection of his own gaze in a mirror he had the sensation of seeing himself as someone else; he regarded himself as an unsubstantial shadow, as an impalpable phantom, and this alarmed him to such a degree that he called to himself softly by his own name. And his voice sounded to him as if it were the voice of another, a voice which came forth out of space, out of the invisible, out of impenetrable mystery. He cleared his throat, touched himself, felt the quickened beating of his heart. He had never forgotten that unforgettable experience.

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?

Who knows? Perhaps one night, when he lay asleep, the shepherd boy had passed by singing his song, and the song had lapped his dream and steeped it in the fountains of life.

Another time--he remembered--when on a journey, he had met a woman, a foreigner, who did not know his language nor did he know hers. Neither of them knew any human tongue in which they could make themselves understood, and they sat there in the railway carriage alone, opposite one another, looking and sometimes smiling at one another. Theirs was a protracted and mute conversation. When he thought kindly and tenderly of her the stranger smiled, and when a less innocent desire stirred within him the shadow of a frown crossed her brow. Perhaps they heard, without themselves knowing that they heard, the measured beating of their hearts, beating in unison while their eyes gazed at one another; but without a doubt the breath of their souls mingled together. For the soul breathes.

The soul breathes.--Why not speak in metaphors?

Our man began to think about breathing and how the air, penetrating into the cells of the lungs, aerates the blood, this inner atmosphere of our bodies. It is the material substance of the world--he thought--which circulates within us; it is the world diluted and made our own. And from this he went on to imagine a kind of spiritual aeration of our mind, and how the world of colours, forms, sounds and impressions of every kind is diluted in it.

But these are metaphors, nothing but metaphors, he said, then at once reflecting: Metaphors? and what is not metaphor? Science is built up of metaphors and language is essentially metaphorical. Matter, force, light, memory--all metaphors. When positivists, or those who consider themselves positivists, try to sweep science clean of metaphors, they sweep them away with a metaphorical broom, and so sweep the metaphors back again.

And then his mind began to play around one of his specially favourite ideas, namely the idea of the superiority of what we call imagination over the other so-called faculties of the spirit, and how the excellency of poets was greater than that of men of science and men of action.

A thousand times he had deplored the barbarous intransigence of most of those with whom he had to communicate--in accidental, not substantial, communion; that dismal lack of comprehension of every opinion which they do not themselves share; that ridiculous belief that there are ideas which one must necessarily consider absurd and which can only be professed by confused and unhinged minds. All that--he was wont to say to himself--is simply lack of imagination, incapacity to see things oneself, even momentarily, as others see them, sheer aridity of mind. How far from all that was the large spirit of the great Goethe, who was able to feel himself deist, pantheist, atheist all at the same time, whose mind embraced a profound understanding of paganism together with an equally profound understanding of Christianity! But Goethe was a poet, the poet, a true and essential poet, not a miserable didacticist or dogmatist like those who think they travel more safely the more ballast of formal logic they carry, at the expense of intelligence, and the more closely they hug the level shores of thought, moored fast to tradition and the senses.

Our man cast his eyes once more over the manifesto and said to himself: “And I have been called an intellectual! I! I who abhor intellectualism more than anybody! If they had labelled me ‘an imaginative’--well and good. But an intellectual?” And he thought of Paul of Tarsus and the pregnant sentences of his epistles.

He thought of Paul of Tarsus and his classification of men into carnal, intellectual and spiritual, for so he was pleased to translate it, or rather to interpret it. For there was a time when he had delighted in exegesis. Not scientific exegesis; not investigating and searching for the actual meaning of the writers of the sacred books; not co-ordinating them logically and trying to discover, by reference to the ideas and sentiment of the age and country in which they lived, what they really felt and thought; but taking as his starting-point the text that had been consecrated and enriched by centuries of tradition and thence launching out into free speculation. The moment that Paul of Tarsus gave his epistles to the world they ceased to be his, they belonged to the world, they were part of the common stock, of the patrimony, of humanity, and it was possible for him to understand them and feel them altogether differently from the way in which the Apostle himself had felt and understood them. That which others did to his writings when they read them and commented upon them, it was possible for him to do to the Apostle’s, provided he undertook the task with knowledge and conscientiousness. The actual text furnished his mind with the necessary foothold, it was the jumping-off place from which his imagination could take flight.