'Each Man Can Be Judged By His Favorite Books'

This I find in The Lone Heretic: A Biography of Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (1963) by Margaret Thomas Rudd, who quotes her subject: “Each man can be judged by his favorite books.” She adds of the great Spanish thinker and novelist: 

“Throughout his long life Unamuno returned to reread those authors whom he had discovered as a boy in his father’s modest library. They were his oldest friends and he would turn again and again to the same passages in those books. This repetition was, he felt, a form of immortality.”

 

Unamuno’s “oldest friends,” Rudd tells us, are Donoso Cortés, Jaime Balmes and Étienne-Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Ignace Pivert de Senancour – all unknown to me, which  seems appropriate. After all, if we are to be judged by our “favorite” books, they may not be the “greatest” or most fashionable in the canon. Their inclusion may even be embarrassing but they reflect our true sensibilities. Rudd translates a poem Unamuno wrote and framed on the wall in his library:

 

“By the fire my son

was reading Quentin Durward;

I too read it thus in years gone by

and thus my grandchildren

will have occasion to read it some day.

And thus Quentin lives even as we

His readers live to day.”

 

Walter Scott’s novel I have never read. Some of my counterparts to its eponymous hero for Unamuno include Starbuck, the widow Wadman and Natasha Rostov. Here’s W. Jackson Bate in his biography of Dr. Johnson:

 

“The three books of which he never tired, said Mrs. Thrale, were Robinson Crusoe, Pilgrim’s Progress, and Don Quixote. ‘Alas,’ he would say, ‘how few books there are of which one can ever possibly arrive at the last page’; and ‘Was there ever yet anything written by mere man’ that one could wish longer than these three books? He would have gone on reading them, he would never exhaust them, because here—as in no other works—his identification was almost complete. These three wanderers—one a castaway, one a pilgrim, and one on an impossible quest—were prototypes of what he felt to be his own life.”

 

Among my  favorite, most-often-reread books is Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1912; trans. Anthony Kerrigan, 1972).