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?”