The Soul of Tragedy. Unamuno, Life 5.11
Our
memory seeks to grasp something stable, something firm, a ground to
hold for all of human time. But that is not what life is, holding the
same ground for all time. Indeed, life might be framed in terms of
letting go, releasing the fixed stability of the corpse to dance in
an ungrounded volatility. Knowing too much is bad the same way moving
too little is lethal: in either case, life demands mobility.
Es
una cosa terrible la inteligencia. Tiende a la muerte como a la
estabilidad la memoria. Lo vivo, lo que es absolutamente inestable,
lo absolutamente individual, es, en rigor, ininteligible. La lógica
tira a reducirlo todo a identidades y a géneros, a que no tenga cada
representación más que un sólo y mismo contenido en cualquier
lugar, tiempo o relación en que se nos ocurra. Y no hay nada que sea
lo mismo en dos momentos sucesivos de su ser. Mi idea de Dios es
distinta cada vez que la concibo. La identidad, que es la muerte, es
la aspiración del intelecto. La mente busca lo muerto, pues lo vivo
se le escapa; quiere cuajar en témpanos la corriente fugitiva,
quiere fijarla. Para analizar un cuerpo, hay que menguarlo o
destruirlo. Para comprender algo, hay que matarlo, enrigidecerlo en
la mente. La ciencia es un cementerio de ideas muertas, aunque de
ellas salga vida. También los gusanos se alimentan de cadáveres.
Mis propios pensamientos, tumultuosos y agitados en los senos de mi
mente, desgajados de su raíz cordial, vertidos a este papel y
fijados en él en formas inalterables, son ya cadáveres de
pensamientos. ¿Cómo, pues, va a abrirse la razón a la revelación
de la vida? Es un trágico combate, es el fondo de la tragedia, el
combate de la vida con la razón. ¿Y la verdad? ¿Se vive o se
comprende?
Intelligence
is a terrible thing. Memory tends toward death, ultimately, as toward
stability. Strictly speaking, that which is alive—the absolutely
unstable and individual—is unintelligible. Logic aims to reduce
everything to identities and categories, so that each representation
we make contains no more information than any other, irrespective of
its particular placement, time, or relation to anything else we
encounter. But in truth there is nothing in the world that remains
the same in two successive moments of its existence. My idea of God
is different every time I think of it. Identity, which is death, is
an aspiration of the intellect. The mind seeks what is dead, for
every living thing is always escaping its grasp. It wants to freeze
the fugitive currents of life, fixing them as shards of ice. To
analyze a body properly, you must diminish or even destroy it. To
understand it thoroughly, you must kill it, reducing its wild
vitality to a rigid corpse within your mind. Science is a cemetery of
dead ideas, though life occasionally flows from them: even so do we
find worms feeding upon corpses. My own thoughts, agitated and
tumultuous in the bosom of my mind, once turned and fixed upon this
page become lifeless cadavers of themselves, dry corpses cut from the
root of my heart that kept them vivid. How then shall reason open
herself to the revelation of life? Here we have a tragic struggle,
the very soul of tragedy, in fact: a doomed battle between life and
reason. Where is truth, upon this field? Is it something we live, or
something we understand?