The Tower of Monterrey
It is freezing. A biting north wind cuts short the breath. From the steely blue a pale sun sheds a glittering light that cuts out the shadows and models the landscape into a kind of architectural relief.
For this crystal-clear light, bright as frost, without haze, appears not so much to illumine as to civilize Nature; it makes it civil, which means that it makes it more than human. To humanize is much, but to civilize is more. To civilize, to make civil—or, if you like, to citizenize—is to superhumanize. Humanity seems to us, so far as man is concerned, to be everything; but civility embraces more than humanity; it is more than all, for it is the future in never-ending process of realization—it is the ideal. The all is that which is and that which is permanent; but the more than all is that which, over and above all that has been and is, will be. The all is the past that is condensed in the present; the more than all is the eternity that embraces the past, the present and the future. The all is the universe and the more than all is thought. For thought exceeds all that has been thought and all that is thinkable and goes beyond them.
The city also is Nature. Its streets and its squares and its erect pillared towers also are landscape. And its lines are like the lines of the country. Baroque lines they are said to be. But not all.
The escarpments which slope down from the vast tableland of La Armuña to the banks of the Tormes are like the buttresses of a gigantic cathedral; they are architectonic. There are villages which seem as if they were sculptured out of the earth of the bleak upland plains, out of the rock itself. And if you look long enough at some dark poplar standing near the spire of a village church, you begin to wonder which is the tree and which the spire. And the skeleton trees, all swart naked bone, look like the pillars of a ruined temple the roof of which has fallen in.
In travelling through this barren rocky Iberian land, have you never sometimes fancied that you discerned in some distant craggy hill the outline of a Baroque cathedral?
And conversely, here in the city, one might imagine oneself to be in the midst of some vast geological formation. Men, like coral insects, have built up these masses of grey and golden coral, gleaming in the naked winter sun.
Every one of these fabrics of stone might be said to be an immense architectonic phrase, an aphorism in lines. In a phrase culminates and is condensed a whole system of ideas, of thoughts. In the title—La Vida es Sueño—of Calderón’s drama, the immortal fellow of “Don Quixote,” is condensed (as Farinelli rightly says in his work La Vita é un Sogno, which I have just been reading) “the substance of all earthly philosophies.” It was by a phrase that each of the seven wise men of Greece won a lasting place in the memory of their race; for these seven wise men eternalized themselves in the thought of their people as being the authors of seven single sentences. And a phrase, a civil sentence, civil rather than human, is an edifice of thought in which economy of material and of brute force has achieved its supreme triumph. The Pyramids are phrases of stone which rise up from the sands of the desert; and like an immense phrase, like one of the periods of Demosthenes, or rather of Pericles, which Thucydides has bequeathed to us for ever, stands the Parthenon. And these towers are phrases too, civil phrases, phrases of civility now made one with Nature.
I know not how I am to translate to you in sounding words—words that are winged, yet captive, words that fly and soar, yet abide—that which this harmonious phrase of hewn stone, this tower of Monterrey, says to me, says to us all, in the fine cutting light of these benumbing winter mornings, when the frost sleeps idly on its lofty pinnacles; but I know that it is a phrase when I see it clear-cut against the blue of heaven. And if men pass away and yet abide, these stones will abide to tell Nature that once there was Humanity, once there was thought; they will abide to tell of plan, and of order, and of proportion, to the Universe.
And why should not the planets which journey through space in obedience to the laws which they themselves communicated to Kepler, understand geometry and mathematics? Is not the whole vast structure of the Universe a great city, the city of God, its supreme Architect and Inhabiter?
All this is a dream. True! But this dream of stone, in the clarified frosty light, tells us that dream is what abides, the lasting, the permanent, the substantial, and that on the surface of the dream, like waves on the surface of the sea, roll our sorrows and our joys, our hates and our loves, our memories and our hopes. The waves are of the sea; but the waves pass and the sea abides; the sorrows and the joys, the hates and the loves, the memories and the hopes, are of the dream, the dream of life; but they—sorrows, joys, hates, loves, memories, hopes—pass away and the dream abides. And it abides thus, converted into stone, stone of the earth, but civilized, civil or spiritual stone, a phrase minted for ever, monumentum ære perennius, more enduring than bronze.
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.
When I go forth in the morning and the tower says to me: “Here am I!” I, beholding it, say to it: “Here am I!”