Soliloquies
I
It would seem, Miguel, that your audience will have to allow you, if only just for once, to talk aloud to yourself, to unburden your heart.—Do it now, and then it will be all the easier to do it again some other day.—Writing for the public is a harsh kind of slavery.
Doubtless you willed it. You chose to be a writer and you must patiently bear the consequences of your choice. But are we as free to choose our vocation as we think we are?
You crave retirement, tranquillity and silence in order that you may devote yourself to some solid and unhurried task, remote from the turmoil that deafens the ear with its noise and blinds the eye with its dust. Your heart with its yearning for solitude turns longingly towards those men of old who dedicated themselves to works that endure, far from the traffic of the world with its daily contentions and anxieties. You yearn for the classic, the eternally classic. But the vertigo of life sweeps you along and you find yourself involved in the burning dissensions of your contemporaries. You cannot live among the dead; you have to live among the living.
And yet, dear Miguel, what a source of consolation and strength is this intercourse with the glorious dead, whose works never die! How the soul is refreshed by the vivifying streams that flow from those immortal spirits who live their deepest lives in us—Homer, Plato, Virgil, St. Augustine, Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Goethe, and so many others!
Yes, there is no doubt about it—this insane eagerness to know what those round about us are saying or repeating hinders us from following the progress of the human soul as it reveals itself in its immortal sons, those erect pillars that are landmarks for all time. What does it matter to you, tell me, what your neighbour is clamouring about? You are not going to follow the example of those whose time and soul are so absorbed in listening to all the superficialities of their contemporaries that they have no time left to enjoy the enduring legacy of humanity. This form of modernity serves only to enfeeble both men and peoples. Distrust novelties, Miguel, and be sure that there is nothing more novel than what is for ever. Homer and Shakespeare are more modern than most of the living writers who are accounted most modern. You will learn more from Plato than from the author of the latest volume in Alcan’s Library of Modern Philosophy. The modern is the fashionable and you must fly from all fashions.
But it is useless—I know it—useless. I can see that the voices round about you, the ardent voices of the living, have caught your ear, perhaps in spite of yourself. It is the voice of humanity, and you are and ought to be before all else a man. Do you remember what your dead friend Coleridge, the wonderful Coleridge, says in his Biographia Literaria about his contemporaries? I will repeat it to you again:
“The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one who exists to receive it.”
Consider this same Samuel Taylor Coleridge who wrote these words and tell me if the memory of this man who died many years before you were born can give you that glow which the recollection of one still living gives you. And nevertheless, you will say, how sweet and peaceful it is to converse with those who once were and to-day sleep in the lap of the teeming earth.
You have dreamed of producing a magnum opus that would endure, and you find yourself condemned to the fragmentary and fugitive labour of journalism. Must you repine at that? We never know, believe me, when we have succeeded best.
And remember that the slowly and carefully elaborated work of the solitary author, holding himself aloof from all collaboration with his public, is perhaps after all only the monument of his own egoism.
Collaboration with the public, I say. For the public collaborates more or less ostensibly in the work of every publicist, sometimes with applause, sometimes with censure. I know that you have been influenced in your work by the letters which from time to time you receive from unknown readers, especially from those in America, and which have provided you with helpful notes and suggestions. But in addition to this, you are influenced, perhaps without knowing it, by the reaction of your readers, of those who follow your work, and this reaction affects what you write, forcing you sometimes to adapt yourself to your readers’ point of view, sometimes to combat it and endeavour to make it conform to yours.
It is said that some of the greatest dramas, among others those of Shakespeare, have been actually created on the stage, in collaboration with the public, having been modified at every representation according to the way in which the public received them. And do you not think that the successive works of a productive author are not very often merely successive editions, more or less revised, of one and the same work?
Every author who writes much repeats himself much; the more original he is and the more he draws from his own depths instead of merely echoing what he hears round about him, the more he repeats himself. The greatest geniuses have been men of few and simple ideas expressed with vigour and efficacy, but expressed also with more uniformity and continuity than those of writers of only average ability. There have been men whose greatness has been owing to the fact that they were men of one idea, men who were simply an idea incarnate. By dint of living one single but noble and fruitful idea, they have succeeded in presenting it to us in all its forms. Variety, multiplicity of points of view, almost always indicates a certain spiritual weakness. But I do not need to convince you of this, for I know how much you admire Athanasius for being a man of one idea.
Yes, your own works, in spite of their apparent variety—novels, commentaries, essays, poems—are, if you consider it carefully, simply the continuous development in multiple forms of but one and the same fundamental idea. And in thus seeking to communicate this central thought of yours, you go on condensing it more and more and discovering new forms of expression for it, until perhaps some day you will hit upon the most adequate, the most precise form. And, believe me, a writer achieves a lasting place when he has discovered the permanent form of any idea, when he has succeeded in giving it its definitive body. And in your effort to discover this, who shall say that this writing of fugitive and fragmentary pieces is not as useful as any other way of search? You know that very often one thinks more when talking than when meditating.
Do you remember that experience which occurred to you one afternoon when you were walking with your friend Vincent, that wise and subtle spirit, so unhappily cut off in his prime? You were arguing as usual; his subtle objections forced you to concentrate your mind, and after a quick reply to one of his questions, almost before the words were out of your mouth, you exclaimed delightedly: “How right that is! how exact! how precise!” And when he showed surprise that you should be astonished by one of your own remarks, you said: “The fact is, it is as new to me as it is to you. Doubtless the solution was already there in my mind, but it was dim and confused. I myself was not conscious of its being there. It was only in the effort to meet your objections that it took shape and disclosed itself to me. And so you see it was really as new to me as to you.”
And so it often happens. Thought depends upon language, for we think with words, and language is a social thing. Language is conversation. And thought itself is therefore social. The only clear thought is transmissible thought. If anyone tells you that he sees a thing quite clearly but that he does not know how to communicate it, you may reply that he cannot be sure whether he sees it clearly or not. To every writer it has happened more than once that he has realized the absurdity or obscurity of his own thought only after he has seen it in print.
Be assured, then, that you meditate more and meditate better when you are writing things like this letter that you are now addressing to yourself than when you shut yourself up in your room to devote yourself to what is called meditation and what is really only mind-wandering. The necessity of giving your thought transmissible expression is that which makes it a living and effective process. It is when your pen is in your hand that things occur to you most readily, and the reason is because then you are not thinking for yourself but thinking for others. Thinking for oneself is not properly thinking—it is losing oneself in vague reveries, like a man on the verge of sleep idly watching the drift of his cigar-smoke. To think is to think for others; thinking is a social function.
You have sometimes heard it said that Paul of Tarsus used to draw inspiration from his own words, that these words provoked ideas, and that in his epistles it is possible to follow this process of ideation by means of verbal associations. And of Augustine of Hippo—one of the immortal pillars, like Paul, Bernard and Martin Luther, of the Christianity of the heart—it has been said that he developed his theme by antitheses, that is to say rhetorically. And both Paul and Augustine were men of burning passion, not solitary contemplatives, but active fighters.
They consider you to be an egotist because you often refer to yourself—you are doing it now in this soliloquy—and talk about yourself, but the truth is that this self of yours, in so far as you are a writer, is something that belongs to all the world—you stand in the middle of the street, hailed by everybody and answering back. You would be not merely an egotist but a miserable egoist if you shut yourself up in the tower of ivory, far from your fellows, and worked day after day upon some minute and exquisite jewel. You work in the open air, in the public gaze, and from time to time, in order to keep your work clean, you blow away the dust of the turmoil that has settled upon it.
Enough. Let us talk no more together, you and I, this hidden and intimate self and this apparent and public self. Are they really two? Are you anything else but a writer? Or rather, this self that is not the publicist, of what worth is it?
II
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?