To My Readers
Yes, I know it—I am not sympathetic to all those who read me, perhaps not even to the majority of them. But what I am to do?... So long as they go on reading me.... For the fact is I would rather that they should find me not sympathetic and nevertheless go on reading me than that they should find me sympathetic and cease to read me. Sympathy is often purchased at the cost of authority and respect. I confess that the quality of being sympathetic does not appear to me to be a very desirable thing in a writer. It is perhaps the beginning of discredit, a discredit that is none the less profound because it wears a gilded disguise.
Yes, I know that I am not sympathetic, that I have perhaps succeeded in making myself antipathetic to many of those who read me and who in spite of this antipathy—or rather because of it—still continue to read me.
A short time ago a friend wrote to me saying that although he often disagrees with me he reads me because his reaction to my opinions stimulates ideas in him. I profess myself well content with this, to beget ideas in those who read me, although these ideas should be the contrary of those which I expound and defend.
But there are many, very many readers who don’t like being obliged to think and who only want to be told what they already know, what they have already thought. In order to become sympathetic a writer has only to flatter and confirm his readers’ preconceptions, clinching the commonplaces to which their minds have given assent. That is the way for a writer to become sympathetic and it is also the way for him to become soon tedious, so that the reader remarks: “Ah, yes, a very sympathetic writer, very understanding!” and ceases to read him.
Most people—I have said this more than once before and as I am an insistent writer, another quality which does not help to make me sympathetic, I shall have to repeat it many times more—most people read in order not to be informed. Yes, literally, not to be informed. The worthy Fulánez takes the paper or the review at breakfast-time and reads it as he would listen to a waltz-tune, in order to while away the time. He dislikes being agitated, he dislikes being contradicted; but most of all he dislikes being told something that he has never thought of before.
There is a spiritual pain analogous to physical pain; there is a spiritual pain when the tissues of the soul are torn away. For just as the body has its tissues of cells and filaments, so the soul has its tissues of impressions, memories, sensations and ideas. The breaking of an association of ideas is like the breaking of an association of bodily cells and may produce anything from a slight irritation to the most acute pain.
It is a matter of common observation that the pain which we feel at the death of someone dear to us, with whom we have lived together, at first goes on increasing until it reaches a point when it begins to diminish. Its progress might be described by a rapidly ascending and gradually descending curve. The first effect is one of stupor. The pain becomes most acute when we feel the gap that has been left in our existence, when we feel the rupture of our associations of ideas and feelings. The image of the loved one was intimately woven into the spiritual tissue of our life, and death cannot tear it away without destroying the tissue.
And every rupture of an association of ideas and feelings is accompanied by a disturbance which varies in degree from the pain that we feel at the death of a father, husband, wife, brother or son, to the minor irritation which is caused by the exploding of some commonplace that had become a habit of our mind. And we writers who are given to breaking these associations—and that is why we are called paradoxists—jar on people and incur their antipathy. It is our fate.
And they tell us that what jars is not so much what we say as our way of saying it. Yes, it is because instead of cutting these associations with surgical delicacy, first chloroforming or hypnotizing the patient, we tear them roughly and when he is most wide awake. It is a question of method, and it is a question of temperament. Chloroform, the clinical as well as the literary variety, has its inconveniences, and there are cases in which the patient has to suffer pain. To irritate people may even become a duty binding upon the conscience, a painful duty, but a duty none the less.
And then there is another thing which makes me antipathetic, I know, and that is my lack of impersonality, my incapacity to produce what is called objective work, my putting my whole self, more or less, into all my writings, my egotism, as it is called. But what am I to do?... I am amazed at those who are able to eliminate their own selves, I am amazed, but I don’t imitate them and I don’t wish to imitate them.
I don’t know how it may be elsewhere, but here in Spain the man, the individual man, irritates us. And as I believe that the great battle is how to win respect for man, respect for individuality, I for my part irritate the myriad-headed, anonymous multitude. Let them respect me. Thus they will learn to respect every individual, to respect themselves as individuals.
Yes, yes, it is quite right to use one’s knowledge with discretion, just as it is quite right to use one’s wealth with discretion. But neither knowledge nor wealth is one’s self; they are something annexed, something that comes and goes, that can be taken or left. But I cannot make a discreet use of myself. If I am deprived of a shilling or a dollar I can submit to it, but I cannot easily submit to being deprived of an arm or, still less, of a piece of my soul. A shilling or a dollar I can give away discreetly, but an arm or a piece of my soul, these I can only tear off and give away passionately, that is to say indiscreetly. And I do not give ideas, I do not give knowledge—I give pieces of my soul. The ideas that I expound matter to me less, far less, than the way I expound them.
It is not the shilling that I give you that counts, but the warmth that it carries with it from my hand.
These antipathies that I provoke proceed—as well I know, in spite of whatever those who see only the surface may say—from the fact that I am not an intellectual but a man of passion. Almost all the things that I have said, hundreds, thousands, have said before me. I am neither erudite nor a savant. There is no great originality in my ideas. Whence, then, the potency which, thanks to God, I have attained? Whence these antipathies and sympathies, and how is it that I am able to say, thanks to God, that I am seldom read with indifference?—It is due to passion, to the tone of my voice.
Yes, I know it, I am antipathetic to many of my readers, and one of the things that makes me most antipathetic to them is my aggressiveness, my sometimes morbid aggressiveness. I don’t deny it. But the truth is, my friend, that this aggressiveness is directed against myself. When I attack others I am attacking myself. I live in a state of inward conflict. I imagine that I am misinterpreted? Very likely, since I myself do not always succeed in interpreting myself aright. The ideas that crowd in upon me from all quarters are always battling together in my mind and I fail to make peace between them. I fail because I don’t even try. I need these battles.
And, moreover I am not anxious for a reputation among scholars, for I am not a scholar, I am not what is called a scholar. Nor even among men of culture, although I am always preaching culture. But by culture I understand the most intense inner life, the life of intensest battle, of intensest disquietude, of intensest desire. I come of a race which some people say is still, in its essence, in a state of savagery, a race of a turbulent and taciturn spirit, a race of which Salmerón said that it had not yet adapted itself to European civilization. And so far as I myself and my own branch of the race4 are concerned, I accept this judgment and I accept it with pride.
No, no, friend, I am not a philanthropist. The hunger and thirst for God are too strong within me for me to love men in the philanthropic way. Needs must be sown among men germs of doubt, of distrust, of inquietude, and even of despair—why not? yes, even of despair—and if thereby they lose what they call happiness, since it is not really happiness, they have lost nothing.
And above all and before all, none of this living in peace with all the world! Living in peace with all the world—horrible, horrible, horrible! No, no, no, none of this living in peace. Peace, spiritual peace I mean, is usually a lie and is usually stagnation. I do not wish to live in peace either with others or with myself. I need war, inward war. We all need war.
Truth before peace. That is my watchword. And to give it greater brilliance I will write it in Latin: veritas primus pace. And it goes without saying that the war that I need as the sustenance of my life and of the lives of others is a spiritual war, not war with gun and sword.
All the rest—in spite of whatever the champions of the central current of culture and of disciplined solidarity and of respect for the so-called definitive conquests of the human spirit may say—all the rest I understand and I am even ready to applaud it if you like; but it is not my concern, it is not my lot to put myself at its service.
And above all, my friend, there is one thing that I have hated all my life and that I hope to die hating, and that is, becoming the prisoner of my public, submitting to follow the course marked out for me by my readers. I will not sacrifice my independence, above all I will not mortgage my future. You understand? I will not mortgage my future. I will keep it open and free.
And so I alienate sympathy?... Who knows? What I want to avoid is public indifference. Sympathies and antipathies are perhaps the same thing. Antipathy—now for a paradox!—is a form of sympathy. Reading me for the sake of being annoyed and quarrelling with what I say or my way of saying it, is the same as reading me and agreeing with what I say. To combat a man is one way of animating and confirming him.
I have put warmth and life into my books and it is for the sake of the warmth and life I have put into them that you read them. I have put passion into my books. Passion of hate, passion of disdain, passion of contempt very often—I don’t deny it. But does warmth come only from this thing that they call love and which, ninety times out of a hundred, is nothing but drivelling mawkishness and debility of spirit? And I have put my loves into my books too, those loves which beget my indignations, those loves which are the cause of my being so often harsh, severe, disdainful. Yes, love makes me antipathetic, a greater and purer love than that delusive sympathy which some people urge me to seek after.
Never, never, never! Let such apostleship be for others. Every man has his own destiny.
And this is not a presumption of superiority. No, don’t think that. If you suspect such a thing it is because you don’t know me. No, it is not that. I don’t condemn your opinion; I don’t regard the advice you give me as bad; I only say that it is no use to me. I tell you that you are mistaken about me. And not because you lack intelligence, no, a thousand times no. You are mistaken because each of us sets out from a different point of view, or rather from a different point of feeling. You appear to me to be an optimist, or at any rate a man who believes that progress will alleviate the pains of mankind; you speak with a certain unction of the noble crusade of thought and of the great enterprise of culture, and I believe that the best that this enterprise can do is to make us forget that we have been born and that we have to die. I confess that I have a tragic sense of life. I confess it without petulance or pedantry, and I know that you will not doubt my sincerity.
This bitterness that you find so disagreeable in my writings has grown with being exercised against myself. I am the sword and the whetstone and I sharpen my sword on myself. Hence it is that I am as tired with the sword-play as I am with sharpening the sword that I play with.
And if I am to tell you the truth, it hurts and wounds me to see men marching as confidently as if they marched on solid ground, some confident in the prejudices and anti-prejudices of their religious beliefs, others slaves of science, others slaves of ignorance, slaves all of them. I would have them doubt, I would have them suffer, above all I would have them despair, I would have them be men and not mere partisans of the party of progress. Despair, even though it be a resigned despair, is perhaps the highest state that man can attain to.
God, friend, did not send me into the world to be an apostle of peace, or to reap sympathy, but to be a sower of disquietude and irritation and to endure antipathy. Antipathy is the price of my redemption.