Miguel de Unamuno

[campanilla]

La niebla de Unamuno.

La nivola.

Sí.

De Unamuno.

La novela Niebla, de Unamuno, eh, tiene...

La, la niebla es una buena metáfora.

Sí, señor.

But in every way symbolic and otherwise human beings try to stop that cycle.

Unamuno said human beings are the only species that hoard their dead and therefore with the ghastly art of the mortician we try to make the body unpalatable to the worms and so to stop life as if to be eaten in due course were an indignity to the human being whereas we eat everything else and we give nothing back.

So that is a kind of a social symptom of our profound disorientation with respect to death.

It is significant that even modern liberalism is forced, in the teeth of rationality, to acknowledge this fact of the religious experience.

Thus we have on one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly unorthodox Spanish thinker Miguel de Unamuno confessing, I believe in God as I believe in my friends, because I feel the breath of his affection, feel his invisible and intangible hand drawing me, leading me, grasping me.

Once and again in my life I have seen myself suspended in a trance over the abyss.

Once and again I have found myself at the crossroads, confronted by a choice of ways and aware that in choosing one I should be renouncing all the others.

The Bab movement in the East, the Salvation Army at home, show us this principle still operative, what a little flock dominated by a suitable herd leader and swayed by love and adoration can do.

And these, like Christianity itself, began as small and inconspicuous groups.

It may be that our hope for the future depends on the formation of such groups, hives of the spirit, in which the worker of every grade, the thinker, the artist, might each have their place, obtaining from incorporation the herd advantages of mutual protection and unity of aim, and forming nuclei to which others could adhere.

Such a small group, and I am now thinking of something quite practical, say to begin with a study circle, or a company of like-minded friends with a definite rule of life, may not seem to the outward eye very impressive.

The action of Don Gregorio Marañón.

But how many hundreds of intellectuals die or flee with the Nazis? And Unamuno too.

Unamuno also, but he died of lingusitis.

They killed him.

Long live the intelligence, long live the death.

He got in and didn't get out of bed, right? Don Miguel de Unamuno, in the official State Bulletin of Madrid, was removed from the title of citizen of honor of the Republic, because they considered him to have been a nationalist.

And

he was dismissed as a university professor, published

That's kind of a signature of many of the greatest writers in the Spanish language.

As I said, that Cervantes or Sábato or Unamuno or Cortázar or Borges, all those guys really always thought about these self-aware stories in the stories and the structures.

So that's embedded in my culture.

So it's maybe a way to...