Feeling others' pain. Unamuno, Life 7.6
The
root of love, for Unamuno, is a desire to understand and be
understood. We want others to feel what we feel, and more valiantly,
we also want to feel for them—to know and share their feelings.
Unamuno sees this more valiant love, that aspires to feel for others,
as being generally more common to women, and motherhood, than to men.
Amar
en espíritu es compadecer, y quien más compadece más ama. Los
hombres encendidos en ardiente caridad hacia sus prójimos, es porque
llegaron al fondo de su propia miseria, de su propia aparencialidad,
de su nadería, y volviendo luego sus ojos, así abiertos, hacia sus
semejantes, los vieron también miserables, aparenciales,
anonadables, y los compadecieron y los amaron.
El
hombre ansía ser amado, o, lo que es igual, ansía ser compadecido.
El hombre quiere que se sientan y se compartan sus penas y sus
dolores. Hay algo más que una artimaña para obtener limosna en eso
de los mendigos que a la vera del camino muestran al viandante su
llaga o su gangrenoso muñón. La limosna, más bien que socorro para
sobrellevar los trabajos de la vida, es compasión. No agradece el
pordiosero la limosna al que se la da volviéndole la cara por no
verle y para quitárselo de al lado, sino que agradece mejor el que
se le compadezca no socorriéndole a no que socorriéndole no se le
compadezca, aunque por otra parte prefiera esto. Ved, si no, con qué
complacencia cuenta sus cuitas al que se conmueve oyéndoselas.
Quiere ser compadecido, amado.
El
amor de la mujer, sobre todo, decía que es siempre en su fondo
compasivo, es maternal. La mujer se rinde al amante porque le siente
sufrir con el deseo. Isabel compadeció a Lorenzo, Julieta a Romeo,
Francisca a Pablo. La mujer parece decir: «¡ven, pobrecito, y no
sufras tanto por mi causa!» Y por eso es su amor más amoroso y más
puro que el del hombre, y más valiente y más largo.
Love
that reaches the spirit is compassion, and whoever has most
compassion is also the most loving. Men burn with ardent charity for
their neighbors only after they have attained the depths of their own
misery, their own superficiality and nothingness. Then they turn
their eyes, opened by this experience, toward those like themselves,
and recognize that others too are wretched, superficial, poised on
the brink of annihilation. They feel compassion for these people, and
love them.
Each
man longs to be loved, or what amounts to the same thing, to have the
sympathy of others. He desires that people feel and share in his
sufferings, his pains. The beggar on the side of the road who shows
passersby his scars or gangrenous stump of a limb wants more than
just alms, and his demonstration is not merely a trick for extracting
it. Real alms, rather than material aid in bearing life's burdens, is
compassion. The vagabond who begs is not grateful to givers who make
offerings while turning away their faces, seeking to avoid rather
than engage. He is more grateful to those who show some kindred
feeling, even if they give no alms, and he would prefer not to
receive alms if this meant foregoing compassion, though he might be
in real need. Witness the pleasure with which he recounts his
afflictions to the audience that is moved upon hearing them. He wants
their fellow feeling, their love.
Womanly
love, above all, is said to be always, in its depths, an expression
of maternal compassion. A woman surrenders to her lover because she
feels the lover suffering with desire. Isabel took pity thus on
Lorenzo, as Juliet did on Romeo, and Francesca on Paolo (†). The
woman seems to speak thus, “Come, poor thing! Don't suffer so
because of me!” And so her love becomes more loving, and more pure,
than that of the man—more valiant and enduring.
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(†)
Three famous pairs of star-crossed lovers. Isabel and Lorenzo appear
in Boccaccio's Decameron (4.5), then in the Pot of Basil
by Keats (pub. 1818): though her family wants her to marry well,
Isabel falls for the young Lorenzo, an employee of her brother; the
family kills him for presuming to return her affection, and she keeps
his head buried in a pot of basil. Romeo and Juliet come from
Shakespeare, whose drama (pub. 1597) shows them also falling in love
against their families' wishes, with disastrous results: Juliet
marries Romeo in secret, feigns death to avoid being married off to
the nobleman selected by her family as her spouse, and ends up
committing suicide after Romeo takes her ruse to be real and kills
himself. Francesca and Paolo are historical adulterers, slain in bed
together in flagrante by Giovanni Malatesta (died 1304 CE),
the husband of one and brother of the other; their doomed romance was
captured first for literature by Dante, who meets their tortured
souls in the second circle of hell, the one sacred to lust (Inferno
5).