This essay was first published in "La España Moderna", number 206, Madrid, february 1906, p. 5-17 and was included in the second (1914) and later editions of "Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho".
You ask me, my good friend, if I know how to set loose a delirium, a vertigo, a foolishness whatever on these poor masses of people, neat and quiet, who are born, eat, sleep, multiply and die. Is there not a way, you say to me, to reproduce the spread of those who scourge, or of those who produce convulsions? And you mention the millennium.
Just as you do, I often feel nostalgia of the Middle Ages; just as you do I would like to live amidst the excitement of the millennium. If we could make others believe that on a certain day, let’s say May 2nd, 1908, the centenary of the cry of independence, that on that day Spain come to an end for ever, then I think the 3rd May, 1908 would be the greatest day in our History, the dawn of a new life.
This is a misery, a complete misery. No one cares about anything. And when someone tries of his own accord, to bring up this or that problem, that question or the other, they attribute it to some kind of business in hand, or else to a desire of notoriety, and an eagerness to draw attention.
Nowadays people here do not even understand madness. They come to say that madmen are such due to their own interest. The sense of nonsense is a matter of fact to these poor wretches. If our knight, Don Quixote should come to life again and returned to this our Spain, they would look for some obscure motive for his noble ravings. If someone denounces a breach of trust, pursues injustice, thrives against vulgarity, then slaves will ask themselves: What is he trying to get out of that? What is he looking for? Now they think and say he does it so they should shut his mouth up with gold; now that it is due to the mean feelings and low passions of revengeful and envious people; now again that they only do it to make noise and get spoken of, all for vainglory; or else that they do it for fun, to while away time; merely as a sport. Great pity it is that so few people decide to practice a sport such as this!
Just look and see. Faced with any act of generosity, of heroism, of madness, all those stupid bachelors, vicars, and barbers of nowadays can only ask: Why does he do it? And as soon as they think they know the reason for -whether it is or not the reason they suppose- they say: Bah! He’s done it for this or that. As soon as something is reasonable and they come to know about it, all its value is lost. That is what logic, wretched logic, is worth to them.
To understand is to forgive, it has been said. And these miserable people need to understand in order to forgive their humiliation, the fact that with deeds or words they are accused of their meanness, without anyone talking to them about it.
They end up asking themselves why God made the world, and they have answered themselves: For His own Glory! And they feel puffed up and happy, as if the fools knew what the Glory of God is all about.
Things were first made, what they are for came after. Give me a new idea, any idea, whatever it is, and it will tell me afterwards what it is for.
Sometimes, when I explain a plan, something I think should be done, there is always someone there to ask me: And then what? You can only answer questions such as these with another question. So when asked “And then what?” you can only ask in turn: “And what before?”
There is no future; there is never any future. What they call the future is the biggest lie ever. The real future is today. What will happen to us tomorrow? There is no tomorrow! What happens to us today, now? That is the only question.
And as for today, all those miserable people feel very happy because today they exist and with that they are satisfied. Existence, pure and bare existence, fills all their soul. They do not feel there is anything else other than the fact of existing.
But do they exist? Do they really exist? I think they do not; for if they did exist, if they really did exist, they would suffer from existing and they would not be satisfied with it. If they really and truly existed in time and space, they would suffer not do be forever and ever. And this suffering, this longing, which is nothing else but the longing for God in us, God who suffers with the feeling of being imprisoned in our finite and temporal character, this divine suffering would make them brake all those waning and logical links with which they try to tie their waning memories to their waning hopes, the illusion of their past to the illusion of their future.
Why does he do this? Did Sancho by chance ever ask why Don Quixote did the things he did? And going back to the same thing again, to your question, to your concern: what collective madness could we infuse in these poor crowds? What delirium?
You yourself have come near to a solution in one of those letters of yours which cover me up with questions. In it you said to me: Don’t you think we could try some new crusade?
Thus it is, indeed; I think we can try to carry out the Holy Crusade of rescuing the sepulchre of Don Quixote from the hands of the bachelors, vicars, barbers, dukes and canons that keep him busy. I think we can attempt the holy crusade of rescuing the sepulchre of the Knight of Madness from the hands of the nobles of Reason.
Naturally they will defend it from usurpation, and they will try to proof, with many a pondered explanation, that the custody of the sepulchre is their concern. They guard it so that the Knight may not come back to life.
All these explanations must be answered with insults, with sticks and stones, with shouts of passion, with blows. If you try to reason with their reasons you are lost.
If they should ask you, as they are used to doing, with what right you are demanding the sepulchre, do not answer them anything, for sure they will see it later on. Later on... may be when neither you nor they exist anymore, at least in this world of appearances.
And this Holy Crusade has a great advantage over those other Holy Crusades from which a new life was dawned in this Old World of ours. Those ardent crusaders knew where the sepulchre of Christ was to be found; there where it was said to be, there it was, while our crusaders will not know where the sepulchre of Don Quixote is. They must search for it while they are fighting to rescue it, all at the same time.
Your quixotic madness has made you talk to me about quixotism as of a new religion. And to that I must say that the new religion you propose and talk about, if it where to take shape, would have two singular characteristics. In the first place that we cannot be sure its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote, -certainly not Cervantes- was a real person, a man of flesh and blood, but rather that we suspect he was a pure fiction. And its other characteristic would be that this prophet was a ridiculous prophet, that he was the jeer and scoff of all folk.
That is the value we most need: that of facing up to ridicule. Ridicule is the weapon that all those miserable men, bachelors, barbers, vicars, canons and dukes who keep the sepulchre of the Knight of madness hidden, are used to handling. A Knight who made the entire world laugh without ever telling a joke. His soul was too great ever to make jokes. He made people laugh through his earnestness.
So then, my friend, start to act as if you were Peter the Hermit and invite others to go with you, and let us all go to rescue the sepulchre that we do not know where to find. The crusade itself will reveal the sacred place to us.
You will see that as soon as the sacred squadron starts to march, a new star will appear in the sky, visible only to the crusaders, a radiant and sonorous star, that will sing a new song in this long night that surrounds us, and the star will march as soon as the squadron of crusaders begins to march, and when they have conquered in their crusade, or when they be defeated all, -which is perhaps the only way to really conquer-, the star will fall from the sky, and there where it falls, there the sepulchre is to be found. The sepulchre is there where the squadron should die.
And where the sepulchre is, there is our birthplace, our home. And there the star will rise up again, radiant and sonorous, on its way up to the sky.
And do not ask me anything else, dear friend. When you make me talk about these things, you make me draw out from the depths of my heart, afflicted by the vulgar environment that hounds and presses me all around, afflicted by the spatter from the muddy lie where we splash about, afflicted by the scratches of the cowardice that surrounds us, you make me draw out of the depths of my afflicted soul the senseless visions, the notions without logic, the things whose meaning I ignore, nor do I want to know.
What do you mean by this? you ask me more than once. And I answer you: How should I know?
No, my good friend, no! Even I do not know what many of these bright ideas that I confide to you may mean, or at least, it is I who does not know. There is someone inside me who spells them out, who tells me them. I obey him but I do not go deep inside to see his face, nor do I ask his name. I only know that if I saw his face and he should tell me his name, I would die so that he should live.
I feel ashamed to have invented fictional and novelistic characters, to make them say what I did not dare to say myself, and to make them joke about things that I feel very seriously about.
You know me well, you do, and you know how far I am from looking for paradoxes, extravagances, and singularities on purpose, whatever some fools may think about this. You and I, my good friend, my only real friend, have often spoken in private of what madness may be, and we have mentioned what Kierkergaard’s child, Ibsen Brand said, that mad is he who is alone. And we have agreed that any madness whatever ceases to be such as soon as it becomes a collective phenomenon, as soon as it is the madness of all a people, of the entire human race perhaps. As soon as an hallucination becomes something collective, it becomes popular, it becomes a social fact, it stops being an hallucination and turns into a fact, into something that is outside those who share it. And you and I agree that we must give our crowds, our people, our Spanish Nation a madness whatever, the madness of any of its members who are mad, really mad, not as a joke. Mad, and not foolish.
You and I, my good friend, have not made a scandal with what they call here fanaticism, and which, unfortunately for us, is not such. No; nothing that is legislated and contained and directed by bachelors, vicars, barbers, canons, and dukes is fanaticism; nothing that has a banner with logical formulae, nothing that has a program, nothing that aims at something for tomorrow, that an orator can explain in methodical speech, is fanaticism.
Once, -do you remember? - we saw eight or ten lads get together and follow one who was saying to them: Let’s do a barbarity! And that is what you and I long for, that the nation should get together and, to the cry of “Let’s do a barbarity!” forward march. And if any bachelor, any barber, any vicar, any canon, or any duke should detain them so as to say: “My children! Alright, I see that you are filled with heroism, full of holy indignation; I too will go with you; but before you all go, and I with you to do that barbarity, don’t you think we should agree on what barbarity we are going to do? What barbarity is that going to be?” If any of those fools I have mentioned should detain them to say such a thing, they should pull him down immediately, and all tread over him, and so begin the heroic barbarity.
Don’t you think my friend, that there are many lonely souls out there, whose hearts demand some kind of barbarity, something to make them explode? Go, then, and try to gather them together, to make up a squadron and start to march, all of us together, - for I will go with them and behind you-, to rescue the sepulchre of Don Quixote, which, thanks be to God, we do not know where to find. For sure, the radiant and sonorous star will let us know.
Perhaps, you say when you are downhearted, when you lose grip of yourself, perhaps it may be that while we think we are marching forward across fields and countryside, we are really going round in circles in the same place all the time. In that case the star will be fixed, motionless over our heads, and the sepulchre inside us. And then the star will fall, but it will fall to be buried in our souls. And our souls will be transformed into light, and when all are merged with the radiant and sonorous star, the star will rise more radiant still, transformed into a sun, a sun of eternal melody, so as to shine down from the sky on the redeemed fatherland.
Forward, then. And take care that no bachelor, barber, vicar, canon, or duke dressed up as Sancho, slips into the sacred squadron of the crusaders. Even if they ask for petty states, what you must do is throw them out as soon as they ask for the itinerary of the march, as soon as they talk about a program, as soon as they whisper maliciously at your ear, wanting to know where the sepulchre is to be found. Follow the star. And do as the Gentleman: put any wrongdoing you find in your way on the right track. First things first, and each thing in its place.
Up and away! Where to? you ask. The star will tell you: To the sepulchre! What shall we do on the way, while we march along? What? Fight! Fight? And how?
How? If you come across a liar shout in his face: Liar! And forward! If you meet a thief shout at him: Thief! And forward! And if you come across someone who talks nonsense, someone everybody listens to speechless, shout at them: Fools! And forward! Always forward!
Is it then – someone you know who longs to be a crusader, asks me – is it then that the lie, the theft, the foolishness is wiped out from this world? Who says it isn’t? The most miserable of all miseries, the most awful and disgusting fallacy coming from a coward is to say that nothing can be done by denouncing a thief because they will all go on stealing; that it's not worth while calling an idiot a fool in his face, because that will not make foolishness decrease in this world.
Yes, you must repeat it a thousand times and more: if only once, just once, you were to put an end to one single liar, lies would be over once and for all.
Up and away, then! And throw from the sacred squadron all those who begin to think about the pace that must be kept as you march on, the time and rhythm to be followed. Above all else, down with those who are always thinking about rhythm! They would turn the squadron into a quadrille and the march into a dance parade. Down with them all! Let them go and sing the praises of the flesh, somewhere else.
Those who try to change the squadron into a dance quadrille call themselves, and each other too, poets. They are not so. They are anything else but that. They only go to the sepulchre out of curiosity, to see what it is like, looking perhaps for a new feeling, and to have fun on the way. Down with them!
These are they who with Bohemian indulgence help to keep up the cowardice and the lie, and the miseries that overwhelm us so. When they preach about freedom they are only thinking of one kind of freedom: the freedom to have their neighbour´s wife. Everything about them is sensuality, and they even fall in love with ideas, great ideas, in a sensual way. They are unable to marry a great and pure idea, and bring up a family with it; they only pile up on them. They take ideas as their lovers, even less, perhaps as their mate for a night. Down with them!
If someone wants to pick this or that flower smiling up from the wayside, let him pick it up, but only as he passes by, without stopping, and let him follow the squadron, whose lieutenant must ever look up at the radiant and sonorous star. And if he should put the flower on his breastplate, not to see it himself, but for others to see it, down with him! Let him go and dance somewhere else, with the flower in his buttonhole.
See here, my friend, if you want to fulfil your mission and serve your homecountry, you must be hateful to those young and sensitive men who only see the universe through the eyes of their girlfriends. Or even worse. Let your words be shocking and bitter to their ears.
The squadron must only stop by night, near the forest or at the shelter of a mountain. There it will put up its tents; the crusaders will wash their feet; they will eat whatever their wives prepare for them; then they will engender a son with them, kiss them and lay to rest so as to start the march again the following day. And when someone should die, they will leave him at the wayside, lay out at the mercy of the raven. Let the dead bury their dead. If during the march someone should try to play the fife, or the flageolet, or the camarillo, or the lute, or whatever it be, break his instrument and throw him out of files, because the rest will not be able to listen to the song from the star. And anyway, he himself will not listen to the star. And anyone who does not listen to the song from the sky should not go in search of the sepulchre of the Knight.
Do not listen to these dancers when they speak of poetry. Whoever starts to play his syringe – that is all his “syringa” comes to – under the sky, without listening to the music from above, is not worthy of an audience. He does not know the depth of fanatical poetry; he does not know the immense poetry of empty temples, with no lights, or images, or splendour, or aroma; with none of those things they call art. Four bare walls and a plank ceiling: like any old yard.
Dismiss all those syringe dancers from the squadron. Throw them out, before they leave for a dish of food. They are cynical philosophers, forbearing, good lads, the type that understands everything and forgives everything. And it happens that when you understand everything you don’t understand anything at all, and when you forgive everything you don’t forgive anything whatever. they don’t hesitate to sell their souls. As they live in two worlds apart, they can keep their freedom in the next world and be slaves in this one. They are all at the same time: aesthete and slothful, or keen on López, or keen on Rodríguez.
Long time ago it was said that hunger and love are the only ways of human life. Of slump human life, of human life here on earth. Dancers only move for thirst or for love: the thirst for flesh, the love of flesh too. Throw out of your squadron, and let them dance there in a prairie, until they are tired out, while one plays the syringe, another claps his hands and another sings to a dish of food, or to the thigh of his last lover. And let them make up new pirouettes, new entrechats, new rigadoon steps.
And if someone should come and say to you that he can build bridges and that sometime or other his knowledge may be useful to cross a river, down with him! Down with the engineer! You will wade across the river, or swim across, even if half of the crusaders should die this way. Let the engineer go and build his bridges somewhere else, where they may be needed. To go in search of the sepulchre the only bridge you need is faith.
***
My good friend, if you want to fulfill your vocation as it should be, beware of art, beware of science, at least of what they call art and science and are really only petty imitations of true art and true science. Let faith be enough for you. Faith will be your art; faith will be your science.
More than once, as I notice how careful you are when writing your letters, I am not sure if you will be able to carry out your task. Frequently you cross out words, change others, correct them, or make blots with the ink. It does not gush out suddenly, pushing forth the cap. More than once your letters become literature, that obscene literature, natural ally to all kind of slavery and to all kind of misery. Slave drivers know well that while slaves sing the praises of freedom, they take comfort from their slavery and do not bother about breaking their chains.
But other times I recover my faith and hope in you, when I sense, under your hasty, improvised, ill-sounding words, your trembling voice overwhelmed by fever. At times you would say they are not written in any certain language. Let each one translate it, as he likes.
Try to live in a constant passional vertigo, governed by any passion whatever. Only passionate people can fulfil really lasting and worthwhile tasks. When you hear that someone is faultless, in any sense this stupid word may mean, flee from him; especially so if he is an artist. Just as the most foolish person is he who has never done or said anything stupid, so the least poet of all poets, the most “antipoetic”, - and antipoetic natures are frequently found amongst poets – is the faultless artist, the artist they honour with the crown of perfection, made of card laurel, of the syringe dancers.
You are afflicted, my poor friend, by a constant fever, a thirst for inscrutable and endless oceans, a hunger for universes, a longing for eternity. You are ill with reason. And you do not know what it is you want. And now, now you want to go to the sepulchre of the Knight of Madness to burst into tears, to be afflicted with fever, to die of thirst for oceans, of hunger for universes, of longing for eternity.
Start marching on your own. All other solitary people will be at your side, even if you do not see them. Each one will think he is alone, but you will make up a sacred battalion, the battalion of the holy and everlasting crusade.
You cannot imagine, my good friend, how all solitary people, without knowing each other, without looking at each other’s face, without knowing each other’s name, walk along together, giving each other mutual help. All others talk one about the other, walk along together, hold their hands together, congratulate each other, spy and denigrate each other, gossip among themselves, and everyone goes his own way. And they run away from the sepulchre.
You do not belong to those who wander about the streets; you are part of the battalion of the free crusaders. Why do you look over the wall to see that type of people, to listen to what they are boasting about? No, my friend, no! When you go by a crowd like this, shut your ears, give your own cry out and keep on your way, straight on to the sepulchre. And let your cry sound with all your thirst, all your hunger, all your longing, all your love.
If you want to live on them, live for them. But then, my poor friend, you will have died.
I remember that painful letter you wrote to me when you where about to give in, to revoke, to enter the gang. I saw then, how much of a burden your solitude was to you, that solitude that should really be your comfort and your strength.
You came to know the most terrible and most distressing state of things; You stood at the edge of a precipice that would have been the end of you; you came to question your own solitude, you came to think you were in company. Perhaps – you said to me – this feeling alone is merely a thought, a result of my own presumption, of my own arrogance, maybe even my own madness. Because when I calm down, I see myself in company and I get friendly handshakes, hearty cheering, words of sympathy, all kinds of signs that I am not in any way alone. And you went on that way. And I saw you were misled and lost, that you were running away from the sepulchre.
No, you are not mistaken when you have fever attacks, when you are dying of thirst, or when you anguish from hunger; you are alone, for ever and ever alone. Bites are not only the bites you feel as such, they are also bites you feel they are kisses. Those who applaud are really hissing at you; those who shout “Forward!” are really trying to detain you on your way to the sepulchre. Cover your ears. And above all, cure yourself from a terrible decease, which sticks on like a fly however hard you try to shake it off. Do not let public opinion bother you; cure yourself of that decease. Only worry about what you are like in the presence of God; take care of what God may think about you. You are alone, lonelier than you can imagine, and even so you are only on the way to absolute, complete and true loneliness. Absolute, complete and true loneliness consists in being alone even of you yourself. And you will not be completely and absolutely alone until you are able to strip yourself of your own being, at the point of the sepulchre. What Saintly Solitude!
***
All this I said to my friend and he answered me the following words in a long letter full of angry discouragement:
“That’s all very well, it’s OK, it’s not bad. But don’t you think that instead of going in search of the sepulchre of Don Quixote so as to rescue it from bachelors, vicars, barbers, canons and dukes, we should better go in search of the sepulchre of God to rescue it from believers and unbelievers, from atheists and deists, who invade it, shouting in supreme despair, and melting our hearts into tears, while we wait there for God to resurrect and save us from nothingness?”
Miguel de Unamuno
in the Introduction of " Life of Don Quixote and Sancho "
Translation by Elizabeth Bush, 2000
Just as you do, I often feel nostalgia of the Middle Ages; just as you do I would like to live amidst the excitement of the millennium. If we could make others believe that on a certain day, let’s say May 2nd, 1908, the centenary of the cry of independence, that on that day Spain come to an end for ever, then I think the 3rd May, 1908 would be the greatest day in our History, the dawn of a new life.
This is a misery, a complete misery. No one cares about anything. And when someone tries of his own accord, to bring up this or that problem, that question or the other, they attribute it to some kind of business in hand, or else to a desire of notoriety, and an eagerness to draw attention.
Nowadays people here do not even understand madness. They come to say that madmen are such due to their own interest. The sense of nonsense is a matter of fact to these poor wretches. If our knight, Don Quixote should come to life again and returned to this our Spain, they would look for some obscure motive for his noble ravings. If someone denounces a breach of trust, pursues injustice, thrives against vulgarity, then slaves will ask themselves: What is he trying to get out of that? What is he looking for? Now they think and say he does it so they should shut his mouth up with gold; now that it is due to the mean feelings and low passions of revengeful and envious people; now again that they only do it to make noise and get spoken of, all for vainglory; or else that they do it for fun, to while away time; merely as a sport. Great pity it is that so few people decide to practice a sport such as this!
Just look and see. Faced with any act of generosity, of heroism, of madness, all those stupid bachelors, vicars, and barbers of nowadays can only ask: Why does he do it? And as soon as they think they know the reason for -whether it is or not the reason they suppose- they say: Bah! He’s done it for this or that. As soon as something is reasonable and they come to know about it, all its value is lost. That is what logic, wretched logic, is worth to them.
To understand is to forgive, it has been said. And these miserable people need to understand in order to forgive their humiliation, the fact that with deeds or words they are accused of their meanness, without anyone talking to them about it.
They end up asking themselves why God made the world, and they have answered themselves: For His own Glory! And they feel puffed up and happy, as if the fools knew what the Glory of God is all about.
Things were first made, what they are for came after. Give me a new idea, any idea, whatever it is, and it will tell me afterwards what it is for.
Sometimes, when I explain a plan, something I think should be done, there is always someone there to ask me: And then what? You can only answer questions such as these with another question. So when asked “And then what?” you can only ask in turn: “And what before?”
There is no future; there is never any future. What they call the future is the biggest lie ever. The real future is today. What will happen to us tomorrow? There is no tomorrow! What happens to us today, now? That is the only question.
And as for today, all those miserable people feel very happy because today they exist and with that they are satisfied. Existence, pure and bare existence, fills all their soul. They do not feel there is anything else other than the fact of existing.
But do they exist? Do they really exist? I think they do not; for if they did exist, if they really did exist, they would suffer from existing and they would not be satisfied with it. If they really and truly existed in time and space, they would suffer not do be forever and ever. And this suffering, this longing, which is nothing else but the longing for God in us, God who suffers with the feeling of being imprisoned in our finite and temporal character, this divine suffering would make them brake all those waning and logical links with which they try to tie their waning memories to their waning hopes, the illusion of their past to the illusion of their future.
Why does he do this? Did Sancho by chance ever ask why Don Quixote did the things he did? And going back to the same thing again, to your question, to your concern: what collective madness could we infuse in these poor crowds? What delirium?
You yourself have come near to a solution in one of those letters of yours which cover me up with questions. In it you said to me: Don’t you think we could try some new crusade?
Thus it is, indeed; I think we can try to carry out the Holy Crusade of rescuing the sepulchre of Don Quixote from the hands of the bachelors, vicars, barbers, dukes and canons that keep him busy. I think we can attempt the holy crusade of rescuing the sepulchre of the Knight of Madness from the hands of the nobles of Reason.
Naturally they will defend it from usurpation, and they will try to proof, with many a pondered explanation, that the custody of the sepulchre is their concern. They guard it so that the Knight may not come back to life.
All these explanations must be answered with insults, with sticks and stones, with shouts of passion, with blows. If you try to reason with their reasons you are lost.
If they should ask you, as they are used to doing, with what right you are demanding the sepulchre, do not answer them anything, for sure they will see it later on. Later on... may be when neither you nor they exist anymore, at least in this world of appearances.
And this Holy Crusade has a great advantage over those other Holy Crusades from which a new life was dawned in this Old World of ours. Those ardent crusaders knew where the sepulchre of Christ was to be found; there where it was said to be, there it was, while our crusaders will not know where the sepulchre of Don Quixote is. They must search for it while they are fighting to rescue it, all at the same time.
Your quixotic madness has made you talk to me about quixotism as of a new religion. And to that I must say that the new religion you propose and talk about, if it where to take shape, would have two singular characteristics. In the first place that we cannot be sure its founder, its prophet, Don Quixote, -certainly not Cervantes- was a real person, a man of flesh and blood, but rather that we suspect he was a pure fiction. And its other characteristic would be that this prophet was a ridiculous prophet, that he was the jeer and scoff of all folk.
That is the value we most need: that of facing up to ridicule. Ridicule is the weapon that all those miserable men, bachelors, barbers, vicars, canons and dukes who keep the sepulchre of the Knight of madness hidden, are used to handling. A Knight who made the entire world laugh without ever telling a joke. His soul was too great ever to make jokes. He made people laugh through his earnestness.
So then, my friend, start to act as if you were Peter the Hermit and invite others to go with you, and let us all go to rescue the sepulchre that we do not know where to find. The crusade itself will reveal the sacred place to us.
You will see that as soon as the sacred squadron starts to march, a new star will appear in the sky, visible only to the crusaders, a radiant and sonorous star, that will sing a new song in this long night that surrounds us, and the star will march as soon as the squadron of crusaders begins to march, and when they have conquered in their crusade, or when they be defeated all, -which is perhaps the only way to really conquer-, the star will fall from the sky, and there where it falls, there the sepulchre is to be found. The sepulchre is there where the squadron should die.
And where the sepulchre is, there is our birthplace, our home. And there the star will rise up again, radiant and sonorous, on its way up to the sky.
And do not ask me anything else, dear friend. When you make me talk about these things, you make me draw out from the depths of my heart, afflicted by the vulgar environment that hounds and presses me all around, afflicted by the spatter from the muddy lie where we splash about, afflicted by the scratches of the cowardice that surrounds us, you make me draw out of the depths of my afflicted soul the senseless visions, the notions without logic, the things whose meaning I ignore, nor do I want to know.
What do you mean by this? you ask me more than once. And I answer you: How should I know?
No, my good friend, no! Even I do not know what many of these bright ideas that I confide to you may mean, or at least, it is I who does not know. There is someone inside me who spells them out, who tells me them. I obey him but I do not go deep inside to see his face, nor do I ask his name. I only know that if I saw his face and he should tell me his name, I would die so that he should live.
I feel ashamed to have invented fictional and novelistic characters, to make them say what I did not dare to say myself, and to make them joke about things that I feel very seriously about.
You know me well, you do, and you know how far I am from looking for paradoxes, extravagances, and singularities on purpose, whatever some fools may think about this. You and I, my good friend, my only real friend, have often spoken in private of what madness may be, and we have mentioned what Kierkergaard’s child, Ibsen Brand said, that mad is he who is alone. And we have agreed that any madness whatever ceases to be such as soon as it becomes a collective phenomenon, as soon as it is the madness of all a people, of the entire human race perhaps. As soon as an hallucination becomes something collective, it becomes popular, it becomes a social fact, it stops being an hallucination and turns into a fact, into something that is outside those who share it. And you and I agree that we must give our crowds, our people, our Spanish Nation a madness whatever, the madness of any of its members who are mad, really mad, not as a joke. Mad, and not foolish.
You and I, my good friend, have not made a scandal with what they call here fanaticism, and which, unfortunately for us, is not such. No; nothing that is legislated and contained and directed by bachelors, vicars, barbers, canons, and dukes is fanaticism; nothing that has a banner with logical formulae, nothing that has a program, nothing that aims at something for tomorrow, that an orator can explain in methodical speech, is fanaticism.
Once, -do you remember? - we saw eight or ten lads get together and follow one who was saying to them: Let’s do a barbarity! And that is what you and I long for, that the nation should get together and, to the cry of “Let’s do a barbarity!” forward march. And if any bachelor, any barber, any vicar, any canon, or any duke should detain them so as to say: “My children! Alright, I see that you are filled with heroism, full of holy indignation; I too will go with you; but before you all go, and I with you to do that barbarity, don’t you think we should agree on what barbarity we are going to do? What barbarity is that going to be?” If any of those fools I have mentioned should detain them to say such a thing, they should pull him down immediately, and all tread over him, and so begin the heroic barbarity.
Don’t you think my friend, that there are many lonely souls out there, whose hearts demand some kind of barbarity, something to make them explode? Go, then, and try to gather them together, to make up a squadron and start to march, all of us together, - for I will go with them and behind you-, to rescue the sepulchre of Don Quixote, which, thanks be to God, we do not know where to find. For sure, the radiant and sonorous star will let us know.
Perhaps, you say when you are downhearted, when you lose grip of yourself, perhaps it may be that while we think we are marching forward across fields and countryside, we are really going round in circles in the same place all the time. In that case the star will be fixed, motionless over our heads, and the sepulchre inside us. And then the star will fall, but it will fall to be buried in our souls. And our souls will be transformed into light, and when all are merged with the radiant and sonorous star, the star will rise more radiant still, transformed into a sun, a sun of eternal melody, so as to shine down from the sky on the redeemed fatherland.
Forward, then. And take care that no bachelor, barber, vicar, canon, or duke dressed up as Sancho, slips into the sacred squadron of the crusaders. Even if they ask for petty states, what you must do is throw them out as soon as they ask for the itinerary of the march, as soon as they talk about a program, as soon as they whisper maliciously at your ear, wanting to know where the sepulchre is to be found. Follow the star. And do as the Gentleman: put any wrongdoing you find in your way on the right track. First things first, and each thing in its place.
Up and away! Where to? you ask. The star will tell you: To the sepulchre! What shall we do on the way, while we march along? What? Fight! Fight? And how?
How? If you come across a liar shout in his face: Liar! And forward! If you meet a thief shout at him: Thief! And forward! And if you come across someone who talks nonsense, someone everybody listens to speechless, shout at them: Fools! And forward! Always forward!
Is it then – someone you know who longs to be a crusader, asks me – is it then that the lie, the theft, the foolishness is wiped out from this world? Who says it isn’t? The most miserable of all miseries, the most awful and disgusting fallacy coming from a coward is to say that nothing can be done by denouncing a thief because they will all go on stealing; that it's not worth while calling an idiot a fool in his face, because that will not make foolishness decrease in this world.
Yes, you must repeat it a thousand times and more: if only once, just once, you were to put an end to one single liar, lies would be over once and for all.
Up and away, then! And throw from the sacred squadron all those who begin to think about the pace that must be kept as you march on, the time and rhythm to be followed. Above all else, down with those who are always thinking about rhythm! They would turn the squadron into a quadrille and the march into a dance parade. Down with them all! Let them go and sing the praises of the flesh, somewhere else.
Those who try to change the squadron into a dance quadrille call themselves, and each other too, poets. They are not so. They are anything else but that. They only go to the sepulchre out of curiosity, to see what it is like, looking perhaps for a new feeling, and to have fun on the way. Down with them!
These are they who with Bohemian indulgence help to keep up the cowardice and the lie, and the miseries that overwhelm us so. When they preach about freedom they are only thinking of one kind of freedom: the freedom to have their neighbour´s wife. Everything about them is sensuality, and they even fall in love with ideas, great ideas, in a sensual way. They are unable to marry a great and pure idea, and bring up a family with it; they only pile up on them. They take ideas as their lovers, even less, perhaps as their mate for a night. Down with them!
If someone wants to pick this or that flower smiling up from the wayside, let him pick it up, but only as he passes by, without stopping, and let him follow the squadron, whose lieutenant must ever look up at the radiant and sonorous star. And if he should put the flower on his breastplate, not to see it himself, but for others to see it, down with him! Let him go and dance somewhere else, with the flower in his buttonhole.
See here, my friend, if you want to fulfil your mission and serve your homecountry, you must be hateful to those young and sensitive men who only see the universe through the eyes of their girlfriends. Or even worse. Let your words be shocking and bitter to their ears.
The squadron must only stop by night, near the forest or at the shelter of a mountain. There it will put up its tents; the crusaders will wash their feet; they will eat whatever their wives prepare for them; then they will engender a son with them, kiss them and lay to rest so as to start the march again the following day. And when someone should die, they will leave him at the wayside, lay out at the mercy of the raven. Let the dead bury their dead. If during the march someone should try to play the fife, or the flageolet, or the camarillo, or the lute, or whatever it be, break his instrument and throw him out of files, because the rest will not be able to listen to the song from the star. And anyway, he himself will not listen to the star. And anyone who does not listen to the song from the sky should not go in search of the sepulchre of the Knight.
Do not listen to these dancers when they speak of poetry. Whoever starts to play his syringe – that is all his “syringa” comes to – under the sky, without listening to the music from above, is not worthy of an audience. He does not know the depth of fanatical poetry; he does not know the immense poetry of empty temples, with no lights, or images, or splendour, or aroma; with none of those things they call art. Four bare walls and a plank ceiling: like any old yard.
Dismiss all those syringe dancers from the squadron. Throw them out, before they leave for a dish of food. They are cynical philosophers, forbearing, good lads, the type that understands everything and forgives everything. And it happens that when you understand everything you don’t understand anything at all, and when you forgive everything you don’t forgive anything whatever. they don’t hesitate to sell their souls. As they live in two worlds apart, they can keep their freedom in the next world and be slaves in this one. They are all at the same time: aesthete and slothful, or keen on López, or keen on Rodríguez.
Long time ago it was said that hunger and love are the only ways of human life. Of slump human life, of human life here on earth. Dancers only move for thirst or for love: the thirst for flesh, the love of flesh too. Throw out of your squadron, and let them dance there in a prairie, until they are tired out, while one plays the syringe, another claps his hands and another sings to a dish of food, or to the thigh of his last lover. And let them make up new pirouettes, new entrechats, new rigadoon steps.
And if someone should come and say to you that he can build bridges and that sometime or other his knowledge may be useful to cross a river, down with him! Down with the engineer! You will wade across the river, or swim across, even if half of the crusaders should die this way. Let the engineer go and build his bridges somewhere else, where they may be needed. To go in search of the sepulchre the only bridge you need is faith.
***
My good friend, if you want to fulfill your vocation as it should be, beware of art, beware of science, at least of what they call art and science and are really only petty imitations of true art and true science. Let faith be enough for you. Faith will be your art; faith will be your science.
More than once, as I notice how careful you are when writing your letters, I am not sure if you will be able to carry out your task. Frequently you cross out words, change others, correct them, or make blots with the ink. It does not gush out suddenly, pushing forth the cap. More than once your letters become literature, that obscene literature, natural ally to all kind of slavery and to all kind of misery. Slave drivers know well that while slaves sing the praises of freedom, they take comfort from their slavery and do not bother about breaking their chains.
But other times I recover my faith and hope in you, when I sense, under your hasty, improvised, ill-sounding words, your trembling voice overwhelmed by fever. At times you would say they are not written in any certain language. Let each one translate it, as he likes.
Try to live in a constant passional vertigo, governed by any passion whatever. Only passionate people can fulfil really lasting and worthwhile tasks. When you hear that someone is faultless, in any sense this stupid word may mean, flee from him; especially so if he is an artist. Just as the most foolish person is he who has never done or said anything stupid, so the least poet of all poets, the most “antipoetic”, - and antipoetic natures are frequently found amongst poets – is the faultless artist, the artist they honour with the crown of perfection, made of card laurel, of the syringe dancers.
You are afflicted, my poor friend, by a constant fever, a thirst for inscrutable and endless oceans, a hunger for universes, a longing for eternity. You are ill with reason. And you do not know what it is you want. And now, now you want to go to the sepulchre of the Knight of Madness to burst into tears, to be afflicted with fever, to die of thirst for oceans, of hunger for universes, of longing for eternity.
Start marching on your own. All other solitary people will be at your side, even if you do not see them. Each one will think he is alone, but you will make up a sacred battalion, the battalion of the holy and everlasting crusade.
You cannot imagine, my good friend, how all solitary people, without knowing each other, without looking at each other’s face, without knowing each other’s name, walk along together, giving each other mutual help. All others talk one about the other, walk along together, hold their hands together, congratulate each other, spy and denigrate each other, gossip among themselves, and everyone goes his own way. And they run away from the sepulchre.
You do not belong to those who wander about the streets; you are part of the battalion of the free crusaders. Why do you look over the wall to see that type of people, to listen to what they are boasting about? No, my friend, no! When you go by a crowd like this, shut your ears, give your own cry out and keep on your way, straight on to the sepulchre. And let your cry sound with all your thirst, all your hunger, all your longing, all your love.
If you want to live on them, live for them. But then, my poor friend, you will have died.
I remember that painful letter you wrote to me when you where about to give in, to revoke, to enter the gang. I saw then, how much of a burden your solitude was to you, that solitude that should really be your comfort and your strength.
You came to know the most terrible and most distressing state of things; You stood at the edge of a precipice that would have been the end of you; you came to question your own solitude, you came to think you were in company. Perhaps – you said to me – this feeling alone is merely a thought, a result of my own presumption, of my own arrogance, maybe even my own madness. Because when I calm down, I see myself in company and I get friendly handshakes, hearty cheering, words of sympathy, all kinds of signs that I am not in any way alone. And you went on that way. And I saw you were misled and lost, that you were running away from the sepulchre.
No, you are not mistaken when you have fever attacks, when you are dying of thirst, or when you anguish from hunger; you are alone, for ever and ever alone. Bites are not only the bites you feel as such, they are also bites you feel they are kisses. Those who applaud are really hissing at you; those who shout “Forward!” are really trying to detain you on your way to the sepulchre. Cover your ears. And above all, cure yourself from a terrible decease, which sticks on like a fly however hard you try to shake it off. Do not let public opinion bother you; cure yourself of that decease. Only worry about what you are like in the presence of God; take care of what God may think about you. You are alone, lonelier than you can imagine, and even so you are only on the way to absolute, complete and true loneliness. Absolute, complete and true loneliness consists in being alone even of you yourself. And you will not be completely and absolutely alone until you are able to strip yourself of your own being, at the point of the sepulchre. What Saintly Solitude!
***
All this I said to my friend and he answered me the following words in a long letter full of angry discouragement:
“That’s all very well, it’s OK, it’s not bad. But don’t you think that instead of going in search of the sepulchre of Don Quixote so as to rescue it from bachelors, vicars, barbers, canons and dukes, we should better go in search of the sepulchre of God to rescue it from believers and unbelievers, from atheists and deists, who invade it, shouting in supreme despair, and melting our hearts into tears, while we wait there for God to resurrect and save us from nothingness?”
Miguel de Unamuno
in the Introduction of " Life of Don Quixote and Sancho "
Translation by Elizabeth Bush, 2000