Memento mori. Unamuno, Life 6.22

Unamuno does not believe that he offers anything new: the quest for novelty is for him a mistake, a failure to recognize how and what we inherit from the past, which lives on in us. To claim personal credit for my own human feeling or expression as though it were entirely unique, utterly unlike anyone else's, would be to destroy humanity, to his way of thinking. What makes us human is the fact that we feel and express so much that is similar: my lament, my sorrow, my tragedy is so far from being unique that I can find it echoing all over the world, in songs and tales as old as time.

Se podrá también decir, y con justicia, que mucho de lo que voy a exponer es repetición de ideas, cien veces expuestas antes y otras cien refutadas; pero cuando una idea vuelve a repetirse, es que, en rigor, no fué de veras refutada. No pretendo la novedad de las más de estas fantasías, como no pretendo tampoco, ¡claro está!, el que no hayan resonado antes que la mía voces dando al viento las mismas quejas. Pero el que pueda volver la misma eterna queja, saliendo de otra boca, sólo quiere decir que el dolor persiste.

Y conviene repetir una vez más las mismas eternas lamentaciones, las que eran ya viejas en tiempo de Job y del Eclesiastés, y aunque sea repetirlas con las mismas palabras, para que vean los progresistas que eso es algo que nunca muere. El que, haciéndose propio el vanidad de vanidades del Eclesiastés, o las quejas de Job, las repite, aun al pie de la letra, cumple una obra de advertencia. Hay que estar repitiendo de continuo el memento mori.

¿Para qué? —diréis—. Aunque sólo sea para que se irriten algunos y vean que eso no ha muerto, que eso, mientras haya hombres, no puede morir; para que se convenzan de que subsisten hoy, en el siglo XX, todos los siglos pasados y todos ellos vivos. Cuando hasta un supuesto error vuelve, es, creédmelo, que no ha dejado de ser verdad en parte, como cuando uno reaparece, es que no murió del todo.

It might be said, and rightly so, that much of what I intend to set forth is a repetition of ideas already explained, and refuted, at least a hundred times. But whenever an idea recurs, this signals that it was not really refuted. I make no pretense that the majority of my fantasies are original, just as I refuse to pretend that my voice is the first to cast them to the wind. The fact that the same eternal lament can keep returning, leaping forth ever from a new mouth, says only that our pain persists.

It is fitting here to repeat once more the same eternal lamentations that were already ancient in the day of Job and the Preacher, fitting even that I should utter them in the same words, so that the progressive types can see that this thing never dies. The man who finds his own tragedy in the Preacher's vanity of vanities, or in the complaints of Job, and then repeats these laments word for word, fulfils an important work of warning. We must always be repeating the human refrain: remember death.

“Why?” you will ask. At the very least, we desire to annoy certain people enough that they recognize that this thing of ours has not yet died, that it cannot die as long as men exist. We want them to realize and be convinced that all past ages exist in this twentieth century of ours: they exist, and remain alive. Whenever something gone returns, this signals—believe me!—that it has not ceased to be at least partially true, though we may have judged it an error; even so, the reappearance of something perished reveals that it hasn't died, at least not utterly or completely.