San Miguel

Sometime in the last ten years or so, I wrote the following on the fly-leaf of my copy of Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life:

The only way to "understand" this book is to suffer it (as in the phrase "to suffer fools gladly"); this I have done now for decades. I begin to appreciate it the more I suffer it. But the book cannot be "understood" in any conventional sense. To try to do so will only result in misunderstanding.

One might call this a "sufi" text--aimed not at the head but the heart--indeed, at the heart of hearts which is nowhere and no-thing so that it might be everywhere and every-thing.

Unamuno was that most rare of beasts: an honest theist--an honest Christian, no less. For he did not shrink from Christianity's utter irrationality. Instead, he gloried in it. But not without second thoughts. And third thoughts. And fourth. And therein lies his true genius.

In his Afterword to my edition of the book, William Barrett expressed a similar sentiment:

To re-read Unamuno--especially when one is reading to find where one stands at last with him--is itself to be in a contest. One emerges a little shaken and winded, for here is an author that insists upon coming at you head on. Yet the man himself is so simple, direct, beguiling--a true friend, but a troubling friend. He troubles us above all when we try to follow too straight a line in trying to pin him down.

One could dedicate a life to living with this book. It would be a life of nobility: one of daily toil and suffering punctuated by occasional episodes of satisfaction and even bliss.

As such, it would be a normal life--except for the fact that the individual living it would be intensely conscious that he or she was living in the lengthy shadow of San Miguel de Unamuno. One would then be a disciple of that disillusioned saint. In other words, a dervish.