Miserere mei, Deus. Unamuno, Life 1.21
An
essential part of Unamuno's philosophy is that life requires
mourning. We must learn to grieve—for ourselves, and for others,
with sorrow that we do not expect or even want to cure. True
mourning, real grief, is its own reason for being, and is at least as
important to us as any joy. It feeds the soul, watering the flowers
of contemplation and peace there. You can hear the Spanish <here>.
Un
pedante que vio a Solón llorar la muerte de un hijo, le dijo: «¿Para
qué lloras así, si eso de nada sirve?» Y el sabio le respondió:
«Por eso precisamente, porque no sirve.» Claro está que el llorar
sirve de algo, aunque no sea más que de desahogo; pero bien se ve el
profundo sentido de la respuesta de Solón al impertinente. Y estoy
convencido de que resolveríamos muchas cosas si saliendo todos a la
calle, y poniendo a luz nuestras penas, que acaso resultasen una sola
pena común, nos pusiéramos en común a llorarlas y a dar gritos al
cielo y a llamar a Dios. Aunque no nos oyese, que sí nos oiría. Lo
más santo de un templo es que es el lugar a que se va a llorar en
común. Un Miserere, cantado en común por una
muchedumbre, azotada del destino, vale tanto como una filosofía. No
basta curar la peste, hay que saber llorarla. ¡Sí, hay que saber
llorar! Y acaso esta es la sabiduría suprema. ¿Para qué?
Preguntádselo a Solón.
Hay
algo que, a falta de otro nombre, llamaremos el sentimiento trágico
de la vida, que lleva tras sí toda una concepción de la vida misma
y del universo, toda una filosofía más o menos formulada, más o
menos consciente. Y ese sentimiento pueden tenerlo, y lo tienen, no
sólo hombres individuales, sino pueblos enteros. Y ese sentimiento,
más que brotar de ideas, las determina, aun cuando luego, claro
está, estas ideas reaccionan sobre él, corroborándolo. Unas veces
puede provenir de una enfermedad adventicia, de una dispepsia,
verbigracia, pero otras veces es constitucional. Y no sirve hablar,
como veremos, de hombres sanos e insanos. Aparte de no haber una
noción normativa de la salud, nadie ha probado que el hombre tenga
que ser naturalmente alegre. Es más: el hombre, por ser hombre, por
tener conciencia, es ya, respecto al burro o a un cangrejo, un animal
enfermo. La conciencia es una enfermedad.
A
pedant who saw Solon weeping over the death of a child said to him,
"Why are you crying like this, if it accomplishes nothing?"
The sage responded, "Precisely for this reason, that it
accomplishes nothing" (†). It is obvious that crying does
achieve something, if only a feeling of relief, but there is profound meaning in Solon's response to the punk. And I think we might resolve
many things if we all went out into the street and cried together,
screaming at the heavens and wailing to God over our sorrows, which
might thus appear together as one common grief. Though God might not
hear us, nevertheless we would still be heard. The holiest part of
any temple is that it constitutes a place where people go to cry
together. A single Miserere (‡), sung together by
a multitude hard smitten by destiny, is worth an entire philosophy.
It is not enough to cure the plague; we must also know how to mourn
it. Yes, we must know how to cry! And perhaps this is the supreme
wisdom. Why? Ask Solon.
There
exists something we might call, for lack of a better name, the tragic
sentiment of life, which carries in its train an entire conception of
life itself and the universe—an entire philosophy more or less
explicit and self-aware. This sentiment can be held, and is in fact
held, not just by individuals, but by whole peoples. Rather than
produce ideas, it directs them, though of course they then react upon
it, offering it their corroboration. Sometimes it can arise in the
wake of an unexpected illness, like a bout of indigestion, but other
times it is constitutional. As we will see, however, there is really
no point here in talking about healthy and sick people. Apart from
the fact that we possess no normative idea of health, nobody has even
proven that people have to be naturally happy. Moreover, we can see
clearly that by virtue of its humanity, the unique awareness it has
when compared with donkeys or crabs, mankind is already a sick
animal. Conscience is a disease.
---
(†)
This incident comes down to us from the lost commentaries of
Dioscurides, via Diogenes Laertius (1.63): καὶ αὐτόν φησι
Διοσκουρίδης ἐν τοῖς Ἀπομνημονεύμασιν,
ἐπειδὴ δακρύει τὸν παῖδα τελευτήσαντα,
ὃν ἡμεῖς οὐ παρειλήφαμεν, πρὸς τὸν εἰπόντα, «ἀλλ’
οὐδὲν ἀνύτεις,» εἰπεῖν, «δι’
αὐτὸ δὲ τοῦτο δακρύω, ὅτι οὐδὲν
ἀνύτω».
(‡)
Gregorio Allegri composed music for the biblical text of
Psalm 51 (Psalm 50 in the Latin Vulgate) in a style known
as falsobordone in
1638 CE. The piece he made was intended for performance in the
Sistine chapel, and it is often known by the Latin phrase that begins
the psalm: Miserere mei, Deus ('Have
mercy on me, o God'). The music was originally kept secret by the
Church, but Mozart attended a performance in 1770 and transcribed
what he heard to produce the first bootleg copy. Thus the secret got
out.