The Sepulchre of Don Quixote
You ask me, my friend, if I know of any way of loosing a delirium, a vertigo, any kind of madness, upon these poor ordered and tranquil multitudes who are born, eat, sleep, reproduce themselves and die. Is there no means, you ask me, of reproducing the epidemic of the Flagellants or of the Tarantists? And you talk of the millennium.
Like you, I often feel a nostalgia for the Middle Ages; like you, I should like to live in the throes of the millennium. If we could make people believe that on a given day, say the 2nd of May, 1908,—the centenary of our shout of independence—Spain would come to an end for ever, that on that day we should be scattered like sheep, then I believe that the 3rd of May, 1908, would be the greatest day of our history, the dawn of a new life.
But now it’s all hopeless, utterly hopeless. Nothing whatever matters to anybody. And if any isolated individual attempts to agitate any problem or question, he is supposed to be prompted either by self-interest or by a thirst for notoriety and a passion for singularizing himself.
Not even madness is understood here to-day. Even of the madman they say that there is method and reason in his madness. The wretched multitude takes for granted the reason of unreason. If our Lord Don Quixote were to rise again and return to this Spain of his, they would go about looking for some ulterior purpose in his noble extravagances. If any one denounces an abuse, attacks injustice, fustigates orthodox platitudes, the slavish crowd asks: What is his object in that? What is he aiming at? Sometimes they believe and say that he does it in the hope of being paid to keep quiet; sometimes that he is actuated by base and despicable passions of vengeance and envy; sometimes that his motive is vainglory, that he only wants to make a stir in order to get himself talked about; sometimes that he does it for the sake of killing time, for amusement, for sport. Pity that there are so few who go in for this kind of sport!
Mark this well!—When confronted by any act of generosity, of heroism, of madness, all these stupid bachelors, curates and barbers of to-day think only of asking: Why does he do it? And as soon as they think they have discovered the reason of the action, whether their supposition is correct or not, they exclaim: Bah! he has done it for the sake of this or for the sake of that. As soon as they know the raison d’être of a thing, that thing has lost all its value for them. Such are the uses of logic, filthy logic.
To understand is to forgive, it has been said. And these mean souls need to understand in order to forgive their being humiliated, to forgive the indirect reproach of deeds and words that show up their own meanness.
When it has occurred to them to ask themselves, stupidly enough, why God made the world, they have answered: For His own glory! And the fools are as pompously satisfied with the answer as if they knew what is meant by the glory of God.
Things are made first, their wherefore comes afterwards. Give me any new idea about anything and it will tell me its wherefore afterwards.
Whenever I put forward some project, something which it appears to me ought to be done, there is always somebody who is sure to ask me: And afterwards? To such a question the only possible reply is another question. To the “And afterwards?” one can only ripost by an “And before?”
There is no future, there is never any future. This thing that is called the future is one of the greatest of deceptions. The real future is to-day. What is going to happen to us to-morrow? There is no to-morrow. What is happening to us to-day? That is the only question.
And so far as to-day is concerned, all these petty souls are quite content because to-day they exist. Existing suffices them. Existence, sheer, naked existence, fills their whole soul. They don’t feel that there is something more than existing.
But do they exist? Do they really exist? I believe not. For if they existed, if they really existed, they would suffer because they existed, existing would not content them. If they really and truly existed in time and in space they would suffer because they did not exist in eternity and in infinity. And this suffering, this passion, which is nothing other than the passion of God in us, of God who in us suffers at feeling Himself imprisoned in our finitude and our temporality, this divine suffering would cause them to break all those paltry logical chains with which they seek to bind their paltry memories to their paltry hopes, the illusion of their past to the illusion of their future.
“Why does he do it?” Did Sancho, perchance, never inquire why Don Quixote did the things that he did?
And to return to your question, to your preoccupation: With what collective madness could we inoculate these tranquil multitudes? With what delirium?
You yourself have hinted at a solution in one of those letters in which you bombard me with questions. “Do you not believe,” you asked me, “that it might be possible to start some new crusade?”
Yes, I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the redemption of the sepulchre of Don Quixote from the dominion of the bachelors, curates, barbers, dukes and canons who have taken possession of it. I believe that it is possible to start the holy crusade for the redemption of the sepulchre of the Knight of Folly from the dominion of the mandarins of Reason.
They will defend their usurpation, naturally, and will endeavour to prove with many and elaborate reasons that the guard and custody of the sepulchre belongs to them. They guard it in order that the Knight shall not rise again.
These reasons must be answered with insults, with stone-throwings, with shouts of passion, with lance-thrusts. These people are not to be reasoned with. If you try to reason against their reasons, you are lost.
If they ask you, as they usually do, by what right you claim the sepulchre, answer nothing. They will find out afterwards. Afterwards... perhaps when both they and you no longer exist, at any rate not in this world of appearances.
And this holy crusade has one great advantage over those other holy crusades which spread the dawn of a new life upon this old world. Those other ardent crusaders knew where the sepulchre of Christ was, where it was said that it was; but our new crusaders will not know where the sepulchre of Don Quixote is to be found. It must be sought for in the act of fighting to redeem it.
Your quixotesque madness has led you more than once to speak to me of quixotism as of a new religion. And I must tell you that this new religion which you propose, if it should ever come to materialize, would have two notable characteristics. First, that we are not sure whether its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote—not Cervantes, of course—was a real man, a man of flesh and bone; indeed, we rather suspect that he was a pure fiction. And second, that this prophet was a ridiculous prophet; the butt and laughing-stock of the world.
It is courage that we need most of all—courage to face ridicule. Ridicule is the weapon wielded by all the miserable bachelors, barbers, curates, canons and dukes who guard the hidden sepulchre of the Knight of Folly. The Knight who made all the world laugh but never made a joke himself. He had too great a soul to make jokes. He was laughed at for his seriousness.
Begin then, my friend, to play Peter the Hermit and call the people to join you, to join us, and let us all go to redeem this sepulchre which lies we know not where. The crusade itself will reveal the holy place to us.
You will see that as soon as the sacred squadron begins to march, a new star will appear in the sky, a bright and sounding star, which will sing a new song in the long night that encompasses us, and the star will begin to move when the squadron of the crusaders begins to march, and when they have conquered in their crusade, or when they have all succumbed—which is perhaps the only way of truly conquering—the star will fall from the sky, and the place where it falls will be the place of the sepulchre. The sepulchre will be where the squadron dies.
And where the sepulchre is, there is the cradle, there is the birth-place. And from there the bright and sounding star will mount again heavenwards....
Question me no more, dear friend. When you force me to speak of these things, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my heart, sick with the atmosphere of conventionality that harasses and oppresses me on all sides, sick with the slime of the slough of falsehood in which we are mired, sick with scrabbling cowardice which shows itself on every hand, you force me to bring to light from the depths of my sick heart visions without reason, concepts without logic, things of which I know not the meaning and whose meaning I do not wish to try to fathom.
What do you mean by that? you ask me yet again. And I reply: Perhaps I don’t even know myself.
No, my friend, no. The meaning of many of these utterances of my spirit I do not know myself, or rather it is not I who know them. There is someone within me who dictates them to me, who speaks them to me. I obey him and I never penetrate within to behold his face or to ask his name. Only I know that if I beheld his face and if he told me his name, I should die that he might live.
I am ashamed of having sometimes created fictitious beings, the personages of my novels, in order that I might put into their mouths that which I dare not put into my own and make them say in jest what I feel in deadly earnest.
You know me, and you know how far I am from intentionally going in search of paradoxes, extravagances, and mannerisms—whatever some dull fools may think. You and I, my good friend, my only absolute friend, have often debated between ourselves as to what madness really is, and we have commented upon that saying of Ibsen’s Brand, the spiritual son of Kierkegaard, to the effect that the man who is mad is the man who is alone. And we have agreed that madness ceases to be madness when it becomes collective, when it is the madness of a whole people, of the whole human race perhaps. In so far as a hallucination becomes collective, becomes popular, becomes social, it ceases to be a hallucination and becomes a reality, something that is external to each one of those who share it. And you and I are agreed that the multitudes, the people, our Spanish people, must be inoculated with some madness or other, the madness of some one of its members who is mad—but really mad, not mad only in jest. Mad, and not foolish.
You and I, my good friend, have been scandalized at that which they call here fanaticism and which—to our shame be it said—is not fanaticism at all. No, nothing is fanaticism that is regulated and restrained and directed by bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and dukes; nothing is fanaticism that carries a banner inscribed with logical formulas, nothing that has a program, nothing that holds out for to-morrow merely a proposition that an orator can develop methodically in a speech.
Once—do you remember?—we saw a group of eight or ten youths and one of them said: “Let’s do something rash!” and the others followed him. And you and I long for the people to get together and shout: “Let’s do something rash!” and begin to march. And if any bachelor, any barber, any curate, any canon or any duke should stop them and say: “My children, that’s right! I see that you are bursting with heroism and righteous indignation. I also will go with you. But before we all go, and I along with you, to do this rash deed, don’t you think that we ought to agree as to the rashness that we are going to commit?”—if any of these mandarins should stop them and say that, then they ought to knock him down on the spot and walk over him, trampling on him, and that would be a beginning of the heroic rashness. Don’t you think, my friend, that there are many lonely souls amongst us whose heart craves for some rashness, something to set it aflame? Go then and see if you can’t gather them together and form them into a squadron and start us on the march—for I will go with them and march behind you—to redeem the sepulchre of Don Quixote, which lies, thank God, we know not where. The bright and sounding star will tell us.
But—you say in your hours of depression, when your spirit fails you—may it not be that when we think we are marching forward into new countries, we are really all the time revolving round the same spot? In that case the star will rest quietly over our heads and the sepulchre will be within us. And then the star will fall, but it will fall in order that it may bury itself in our souls. And our souls will be turned to light, and when they are all fused together in the bright and sounding star, the star will mount upwards, brighter still, and it will change into a sun, a sun of eternal melody, to lighten the sky of our redeemed country.
Forward then! And take care that no bachelors, barbers, curates, canons or dukes disguised as Sancho Panzas join the sacred squadron of crusaders. No matter if they ask you for islands; what you have got to do is to throw them out directly they ask to be informed of the itinerary of the march, directly they begin to talk about a program, directly they whisper to you and ask you, maliciously, to tell them the whereabouts of the sepulchre. Follow the star! And do like the Knight—redress the wrong that lies in front of you. Do now what is to be done now; do here what is to be done here.
Begin the march! Where are we going? The star answers: To the sepulchre! What are we going to do on the way, as we march? What? Fight! Fight, and how?
How? If you come across a man who is telling lies, shout out Liar! in his face, and forward! If you come across a man who is stealing, shout out Thief! and forward! If you come across a man who is talking fool-talk to a crowd listening with gaping mouths, shout out Idiots! and forward! Always forward!
“And is this the way,” a would-be crusader asks me, “that you propose to abolish lying and thieving and foolishness from the world?” Why not? The most pusillanimous of all pusillanimities, the most detestable and pestilent sophistry of cowardice, is that of saying that it is no use denouncing a thief because others will go on stealing, that nothing is gained by calling a fool a fool to his face, for this will not lessen the sum of foolishness in the world.
Yes, it has got to be repeated a thousand and one times—if you can finish once, only once, utterly and for ever, with only one liar, then you will have finished with lying for good and all.
March then! And throw out of the sacred squadron all those who begin to pay too much attention to the step that has to be kept on the march, to its time and rhythm. Above all, out with those who are always talking about rhythm. They will turn your squadron into a quadrille and the march into a dance. Out with them! Let them go and sing to the flesh somewhere else.
Those who would seek to turn your marching squadron into a quadrille call themselves and call one another poets. They are not. They are anything else you like. They only go to the sepulchre out of curiosity, to see what it is like, to get a new sensation, and to amuse themselves on the way. Out with them!
They it is whose Bohemian tolerance contributes to the maintenance of cowardice and falsehood and all the other ignominies that overwhelm us. When they preach liberty, the only liberty they are thinking about is that of making free with their neighbour’s wife. They are compact of sensuality, and they have a sensual attitude even to the great ideas that they are enamoured of. They are incapable of marrying themselves to any great and pure idea and begetting a family upon it; they only intoxicate themselves with ideas. They make mistresses of them, and sometimes tire of them after a single night. Out with them!
If when on the march anyone wants to pluck a flower that smiles by the roadside, let him pluck it, but in passing, without stopping, and let him follow the squadron, whose leader must not take his eyes off the bright and sounding star. And if he fastens the flower to his breastplate, not to look at himself but for others to look at, out with him! Let him go off, with his flower in his buttonhole, and dance somewhere else.
Listen, my friend. If you wish to fulfil your mission and serve your country, you must needs make yourself hateful to all those sensible young men who see the world only through the eyes of the woman they love. Or worse still: your words must be strident and bitter in their ears.
The squadron must halt only at night, at the edge of the wood or in the shadow of the mountain. The crusaders will pitch their tents, they will wash their feet, they will sup on what their wives have prepared for them, and afterwards they will beget sons on them, they will give them a kiss, and then they will fall asleep and the following day they will continue their march. And when any one of them dies, they will leave him by the roadside, shrouded in his armour, to the mercy of the ravens. Let the dead bury their dead.
If during the march anyone essays to play the fife or the pipe or the flute or the guitar or whatever it may be, break his instrument and throw him out of the ranks, for he hinders the others from hearing the song of the star. And, what is more, he himself does not hear it. And he who does not hear the celestial song must not go in quest of the sepulchre of the Knight.
They will talk to you, these poet-dancers. Pay no heed to them. He who begins to play his Pan-pipes beneath the sky of heaven and does not hear the music of the spheres, does not deserve to hear it. He does not know the abyss-deep depths of the poetry of fanaticism, he does not know the infinite poetry of empty temples, without lights, without ornament, without images, without pomps, without incense, without anything of what is called art.
Throw all these Pan-pipe dancers out of the squadron. Throw them out before they leave you for a mess of pottage. They are the cynical philosophers, the tolerant Bohemians, the good fellows who understand everything and forgive everything. And he who understands everything understands nothing and he who forgives everything forgives nothing. They have no scruples about selling themselves. As they live in two worlds at the same time, they are able to preserve their liberty in the other world and sell themselves as slaves in this. They serve art and at the same time they are the servants of López or Pérez or Rodriguez.
It has been said that hunger and love are the two mainsprings of human life. Of this low human life, of the life of earth. The dancers dance only because of hunger or because of love; hunger of the flesh, love also of the flesh. Throw them out of the squadron and let them dance their fill in yonder meadow, while one plays the pipe, another claps his hands to the music, and another sings in praise of his pottage or of his mistress’s thighs. And there let them invent new dancesteps, new pirouettes, new figures of a rigadoon.
And if anyone shall come to you and say that he knows how to construct bridges and that perhaps a time will come when you will wish to avail yourself of his science in order to cross over a river, out with him! Out with the engineer! Rivers will be crossed by wading or swimming them, even if half the crusaders drown themselves. Let the engineer go off and build bridges somewhere else, where they are badly wanted. For those who go in quest of the sepulchre, faith is bridge enough.
My friend, if you want to fulfil your task duly, distrust art, distrust science, or at any rate distrust that which is called art and science and which is nothing but a wretched mockery of true art and true science. Let your faith suffice you. Your faith will be your art, your faith will be your science.
More than once, when I observed what pains you take in composing your letters, I have doubted whether you would be able to accomplish your work. They are full of erasures, emendations, corrections, Pan-pipings. They don’t jet forth violently, driving out the plug. Occasionally your letters degenerate into literature, into that filthy literature which is the natural ally of all slaveries and of all ignominies. Slavedrivers know well enough that when the slave is singing a hymn to liberty, he is consoling himself for his slavery and not thinking about breaking his chain.
But at other times I regain my faith and hope in you when I feel beneath the hurrying, spontaneous, cacophonous words the voice trembling with the fever that consumes you. There are times when your speech may be said to belong to no determinate language. Let everyone translate it into his own.
Aim at living in a continual vertigo of passion, be the passion that dominates you what it may. Only men of passion achieve works that really live and bear fruit. When you hear it said of someone that his works are impeccable, in whichever sense that stupid word is employed, fly from him—above all if he is an artist. Just as the man who is most a fool is he who has never done or said a foolish thing, so the artist who is least a poet, most anti-poetic—and among artists anti-poetic natures are common—is the impeccable artist, the artist whom the Pan-pipe dancers decorate with the pasteboard laurel crown of impeccability.
You are consumed, my friend, with a perpetual fever, with a thirst for unfathomable, shoreless oceans, with a hunger for universes, with a home-sickness for eternity. Reason is suffering to you. And you don’t know what you want. And now, now you want to go to the sepulchre of the Knight of Folly and there dissolve yourself in tears, consume yourself in fever, die of your thirst for oceans, of your hunger for universes, of your home-sickness for eternity.
Begin to march, alone. All the other lonely souls will march by your side, even though you don’t see them. Each one will think that he marches alone, but together you will form a sacred battalion, the battalion of the holy and unending crusade.
You don’t yet understand, my good friend, how all lonely souls, without knowing one another, without beholding one another’s face, without knowing one another’s names, journey together and lend one another mutual support. The others, those who are not lonely, talk about one another, offer one another their hands, congratulate one another, belaud and denigrate one another, chatter among themselves—and each one goes his own way. And they all fly from the sepulchre.
You don’t belong to the coterie but to the battalion of free crusaders. Why do you hover round the walls of the coterie to hear what they are cackling about inside? No, my friend, no! When you pass close to a coterie, stop your ears, fling your word and go straight on, on to the sepulchre. And let the word that you fling vibrate with all your thirst, with all your hunger, with all your home-sickness, with all your love.
I remember that unhappy letter that you wrote me when you were on the point of succumbing, of yielding, of joining the confraternity. I saw then how much your solitude weighed upon you, that solitude which must be your consolation and your strength.
You had arrived at the most terrible and desolating state of all; you had approached the brink of the precipice of your perdition; you had come to doubt your solitude, you had come to believe that you were surrounded by companions. “May not this notion that I am alone,” you said, “be mere cavilling, the fruit of pride, of petulance, perhaps of madness? For when I am tranquil, I see myself companioned, I feel my hand warmly clasped, I hear voices of encouragement, words of sympathy, I receive all kinds of proofs that I am not alone—far from it.” And I saw you deceived and lost, I saw you flying from the sepulchre.
No, you are not deceived in the accesses of your fever, in the agonies of your thirst, in the anguish of your hunger; you are alone, eternally alone. Not only are the bites that you feel really bites, but those that seem like kisses are bites too. Those who applaud you are hissing you, they want to stop you marching to the sepulchre when they shout “Forward!” Stop your ears. And, above all, beware of a terrible temptation—however much you may try to shake it off, it will return to you with the pertinacity of a fly—beware of the temptation to concern yourself with how you appear to others. Think only of how you appear to God, think only of the idea that God has of you.
You are alone, much more alone than you imagine, and yet, even so, you have not arrived at absolute, utter, real solitude. Absolute, utter, real solitude consists in not being even with yourself. And you will not be really, utterly, absolutely alone until you have emptied yourself of yourself, by the side of the sepulchre. Holy Solitude!
All this I said to my friend, and he answered me, in a long letter, full of furious dismay, in these words:
“All that you say is good, very good. But don’t you think that instead of going in quest of the sepulchre of Don Quixote and redeeming it from the bachelors, curates, barbers, canons and dukes, we ought to go in quest of the sepulchre of God and rescue it from the atheists and deists who occupy it, and there, giving voice to our supreme despair and dissolving our heart in tears, wait for God to rise again and save us from nothingness?”