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 race[4] 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.