'Reading, Thinking and, Eventually, Writing'

Last week I wrote about a new book by Nicholas Tate, Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does (Ludovika University Press, Budapest), and over the weekend Tate sent me an article he had written for Hungarian Conservative magazine, “Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Montaigne of the Andes, on Books and Reading.” Gómez (1913-94) was a Colombian philosopher and crafter of more than 13,000 of what he called escolios (scholia or comments), available in English at Don Colacho’s Aphorisms. That’s how I discovered them more than a decade ago. Gómez is largely unknown in English and few have written about him, which is a shame because we can use his uncompromising wisdom. Gómez was not a political creature. Tate quotes one of his escolios: “Being a reactionary is understanding that man is a problem without human solutions.” 

Gómez Dávila’s sensibility was not constituted for Twitter-like venom or frivolity. He was classically educated, deeply read in at least eight languages and amassed a personal library of more than 30,000 books. Gómez was no misanthropic hermit. Tate writes:

 

“Although not a recluse—he was married with three children, a polo player, and had many friends within the Bogotano haute bourgeoisie—he turned down offers of political or diplomatic posts and spent most of  his time reading, thinking and, eventually, writing. It was in his library that he often read late into the night. It was in his library that he hosted friends at tertulias (literary soirées). It was into his library that his bed was brought when he was unwell and it was there, surrounded by the legacy of a civilization on which he had come to believe the world had turned its back, that he died.”

 

Each of his aphorisms is concise, often barbed, dense with thought. Our thinking has grown increasingly binary, a predisposition encouraged by the nature of “social media” and the more fashionable neighborhoods of the digital world: “like” as a substitute for “think.” With Don Colacho, his aphorisms, read individually, are calls to self-examination. They betray our will to dishonesty and cowardice, intellectual and otherwise. Only superficially are they Tweet-like. They are “sculpted,” precise and inspired. All the dross has been removed. Even when we find him mistaken, Don Colacho is usefully mistaken. Tate places him in the lineage  of the great French moralistes, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Chamfort and Joubert.

 

Take this aphorism: “The true reader clings to the text he reads like a shipwrecked man to a floating plank.” An American reader may remember this: “The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth? Because one did survive the wreck.” Ishmael, of course, but the author of the aphorism is Gómez and he too is a survivor, doubly so. He endured the wreckage of Western Culture and wrote amidst the rubble, and now, slowly, thanks to readers and writers like Tate, who work like medieval monks in splendid isolation, his work is rediscovered, translated and can be newly appreciated. Tate explains Don Colacho’s advocacy of books as more than a merely personal taste:

 

“At the heart of this view of philosophy and of a philosophical way of life was reading books. Gómez was insistent that reading should not become an ‘opium of the spirit’ and substitute for living. Its purpose was to help us to live more consciously, seeing through the fictions and simplicities that surround us in our daily lives and keeping our critical and reasoning faculties in good order. If we read mainly for utilitarian reasons or for light entertainment our existing prejudices will just be confirmed.”

 

Gómez had no systematic philosophy of life, no program or ideology. In this he reminds me of Michael Oakeshott, another aphoristic writer and a thinker as independent and apolitical as can be imagined in our age. Neither could be a loyal member of any political party.  

 

“He was [. . . ] consistent in his distaste for modernity," Tate writes, "as a phase in which humanity, threatened on all sides by ‘the state, technology’ and (as ever) the temptations of ‘the devil’, lies imprisoned ‘like an animal in a trap.’”