That line
has spared me a lot of lasting embarrassment, the kind that still makes your
face hot after forty years. There’s a higher sense in some of the ridiculous
things we say and do. Miguel de Unamuno is writing of his countryman Don
Quixote and the helmet – or barber’s basin. We can almost find a strain of
nobility in our ridiculousness: “For it was by making himself ridiculous that Don
Quixote achieved immortality.” I underwent a medical procedure Friday morning
that, had I witnessed it as a third-person observer, I would have found
simultaneously disturbing and hilarious. That’s how I tried to look at it in
the first-person. Perspective is everything.
One of the
books in my possession longest is Anthony Kerrigan’s 1972 translation of
Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men
and Nations. It’s a rare book that grows proportionally with us. We will
get out of it precisely what it is calibrated to deliver, depending on how much
we’ve grown. Unamuno can be embarrassingly wise:
“. . . man’s
highest pleasure consists in achieving and intensifying consciousness; not so
much the pleasure of knowing, but that of learning. In knowing something we
tend to forget it, to make the knowing of it unconscious, so to say. Man’s
pleasure, his purest delight, is allied to the act of learning, of becoming
aware of acquiring differentiated knowledge.
Unamuno was
born on this date, Sept. 29, in 1863, and died on Dec. 31, 1936.
2 comments:
What a nice coincidence — I just ordered that book a few days ago after reading an intriguing mention of Unamuno in an article at Aeon. I'll take this as a sign that I should bump it up to the head of the line!
My son, five going on six, is at that age where one of his most touching attributes is the solemnity with which he dons the Quixotic martial costumes of his own devise - cowboy knight or intergalactic police constable - and I cannot but doff him of his helm and tousle his hair with great affection, at which he grins at the great and ridiculous fun of his whole enterprise.
Ger
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