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!”