The Last Illusion. Unamuno, Life 3.8

Unamuno wants to live forever as himself. Ironically, the thought that this is impossible can incline us to reject life altogether. Here is a tragic paradox.

Ya el poeta del dolor, del aniquilamiento, aquel Leopardi que, perdido el último engaño, el de creerse eterno,

Perì l’inganno estremo

ch’eterno io mi credei,

le hablaba a su corazón de l’infinita vanitá del tutto, vió la estrecha hermandad que hay entre el amor y la muerte y cómo cuando «nace en el corazón profundo un amoroso afecto, lánguido y cansado juntamente con él en el pecho, un deseo de morir se siente». A la mayor parte de los que se dan a sí mismos la muerte, es el amor el que les mueve el brazo, es el ansia suprema de vida, de más vida, de prolongar y perpetuar la vida lo que a la muerte les lleva, una vez persuadidos de la vanidad de su ansia.

Trágico es el problema y de siempre, y cuanto más queramos de él huir, más vamos a dar en él. Fué el sereno —¿sereno?— Platón, hace ya veinticuatro siglos, el que en su diálogo sobre la inmortalidad del alma dejó escapar de la suya, hablando de lo dudoso de nuestro ensueño de ser inmortales, y del riesgo de que no sea vano aquel profundo dicho: ¡hermoso es el riesgo!, καλός γὰρ ὁ κίνδυνος, hermosa es la suerte que podemos correr de que no se nos muera el alma nunca, germen esta sentencia del argumento famoso de la apuesta de Pascal.

Frente a este riesgo, y para suprimirlo, me dan raciocinios en prueba de lo absurda que es la creencia en la inmortalidad del alma; pero esos raciocinios no me hacen mella, pues son razones y nada más que razones, y no es de ellas de lo que se apacienta el corazón. No quiero morirme, no, no quiero ni quiero quererlo; quiero vivir siempre, siempre, siempre, y vivir yo, este pobre yo que me soy y me siento ser ahora y aquí, y por esto me tortura el problema de la duración de mi alma, de la mía propia.

Leopardi, the poet of pain and annihilation, already recognized his loss of the last illusion, a belief in his own eternity:

Last the dream that I lost then

Belief that I might never end.

He spoke to his heart then of "the infinite emptiness of all things" (†), seeing the close kinship that binds love and death together, so that whenever "a deep feeling of love rises in the heart, a desire to die stirs in the chest to meet it, a death-wish languid and tired" (‡). The greater part of those who give themselves up to death do so out of a kind of love—a superlative anxiety for life, and more life. This anxiety for prolonging and perpetuating life drives them to death, when they become convinced of its vanity, its emptiness.

The problem is tragic and quite old: the more we wish to flee from it, the more we will find ourselves stuck. It was Plato the serene—was he though?—who found a way to escape from himself some twenty-four centuries ago in his dialogue on the immortality of the soul. He spoke there of our doubtful dream of becoming immortals, and of the danger that this profound saying prove true: "How beautiful the risk of believing in immortality!" (Phaedo 114d). Beautiful too would be the luck of never losing our soul to death! Here is the seed for the argument that became Pascal's famous wager (*).

Face to face with this terrible risk of losing everything, folk give me arguments to overcome it, rational arguments proving that belief in the immortality of the soul is absurd. But these arguments make no impression on me, for they are merely reasons, and the heart never sets itself at ease because of reasons. I do not want to die. No! I don't even want to want it. I want to live forever, eternally, and always, and I want to live as myself: the poor self that I am, that I feel myself to be right here and now. This is why the problem of my soul's permanence tortures me: I'm worried about myself, my own soul.

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(†) The poem Unamuno quotes here is To Myself, written in 1833 and published in 1835 as one of the five songs in the Cycle of Aspasia.

(‡) I am not sure precisely what passage Unamuno translates here. The text sounds as though it derives from Leopardi's Miscellany, a large collection of notes and essays.

(*) In the Phaedo, immortality appears as a property of soul and life in general, but not in the particular. When we go through life and death as individuals, the story goes, our material experience is something limited in ways that we cannot find soul or life limited generally or universally. Life passes down from species to species, from parents to children, in a cycle whose beginning and end lie outside our view, so we regard it as eternal. But our memory is not eternal, nor are any of the other momentary material expressions we associate with the thing called self. This is a sufficient rational argument for immortality, but it dispenses with the personal and intimate immortality that Unamuno craves. Blaise Pascal's wager, put forward in the Thoughts, is briefly this: if you must be either eternal or not, you might as well act as though you are, as this will not harm you in the present and may benefit your future, while the reverse is not true.