Further up & further in. Unamuno, Life 7.7
According
to Unamuno, love is feeling for and with things, an
action that Spanish indicates using the verb compadecer, which
means to show compassion, or more literally to suffer with
someone. As we suffer with the world and ourselves, we recognize
viscerally the limitations of mortality, and achieve an ability to
love ourselves that transcends the idle admiration of what we might
regard as our best qualities (superficial or profound: our health and
our goodness are both subject to temporal limitation).
La
compasión, es, pues, la esencia del amor espiritual humano, del amor
que tiene conciencia de serlo, del amor que no es puramente animal,
del amor, en fin, de una persona racional. El amor compadece, y
compadece más cuanto más ama.
Invirtiendo
el nihil
volitum quin praecognitum, os dije que nihil
cognitum quin praevolitum, que no se conoce nada que
de un modo o de otro no se haya antes querido, y hasta cabe añadir
que no se puede conocer bien nada que no se ame, que no se
compadezca.
Creciendo
el amor, esta ansia ardorosa de más allá y más adentro, va
extendiéndose a todo cuanto ve, lo va compadeciendo todo. Según te
adentras en ti mismo y en ti mismo ahondas, vas descubriendo tu
propia inanidad, que no eres todo lo que no eres, que no eres lo que
quisieras ser, que no eres, en fin, más que nonada. Y al tocar tu
propia nadería, al no sentir tu fondo permanente, al no llegar ni a
tu propia infinitud, ni menos a tu propia eternidad, te compadeces de
todo corazón de ti propio, y te enciendes en doloroso amor a ti
mismo, matando lo que se llama amor propio, y no es sino una especie
de delectación sensual de ti mismo, algo como un gozarse a sí misma
la carne de tu alma.
Compassion
is the essence of human spiritual love, of the love that knows what
it is, the love that is not purely animal: in sum, the love of a
rational person. Love feels for others, more so as it becomes more
loving.
No
thing is wanted before we notice it. Turning this Latin
saw on its head, I have told you that no thing is noticed before
we want it—that there is no getting to know a thing you
haven't already desired, in some way or another, and it is almost
right to add that we cannot know anything well that we haven't loved,
that we haven't felt for.
As
love grows, extending its ardent longing for what lies further up and
further in, reaching out to everything it sees, it feels for
everything. The further inside yourself you go, the deeper you sink
into your own depths, the more you discover your own inanity: you
are not everything you fail to be, nor are you what you might want to
be. In the end, you find that you are no more than a nonentity. And
upon touching your own nothingness, in the moment of feeling that
your inner abyss cannot endure, you recognize that you won't reach
your own infinity, much less your own eternity. In this moment you
feel for yourself from the heart, kindling there a painful love of
yourself, killing the thing people call self-love, which is really
just a sensual enjoyment of yourself, a fascination of the soul for
itself that would be lust in the flesh.