Essays and soliloquies

I am writing these lines, to-day the 6th of June, 1924, in this island of Fuerteventura, an island that is propitious to calm thinking and to a laying bare of the soul, even as this parched land is bare, bare even to the bone. Here I have been confined now for nearly three months, no reason for my confinement having been given other than the arbitrary mandate of the military power that is de-civilizing and debasing my native country.

Hither came my friend Mr. J. E. Crawford Flitch to bear me company. He was entrusted by Mr. Alfred A. Knopf with the task of making an anthology or florilegium of my shorter articles and extracts from my more extensive writings which should present a conspectus of my whole literary work. It is he, my friend and translator, who is responsible for the selection of the pieces which form this anthology.

I am in principle an enemy of all such selections or anthologies of an author’s works, and the more so when the author’s influence is due primarily not so much to his ideas as to the passionate tone and gesture with which he expresses them, to his style. This work of selection appears to me to be as difficult as would be that of abridging a sonata or a picture. And what appears to me almost impossible is that the author himself should make the selection. It is not possible for us to see ourselves from the outside, to become part of our public.

In any case, a work like this is a kind of index or catalogue, and its chief utility is to incite in the public a desire to get to know the author better. It is, to put it bluntly, in the nature of an advertisement.

Collections of selected writings are most valuable when the chief importance of an author lies in his ideology, which may or may not be welded into a system; they are less valuable when he is distinguished not so much by his ideas as by the warm images which incarnate them. It is relatively easy to give a summary of an author when we are asked: “What does he say?” but not so easy when the question to be answered is: “How does he say it?” That is to say, it is possible to abridge a philosophic system, but not a poem. In the poem, that which we call the argument is the most external element of its form, and its essence, the essence of the poem, is the rhythm, the aroma of the words, the style. Rhythm may give birth to argument or subject, but subject does not always give birth to rhythm.

In selecting these pieces--torsos, arms and heads of statuary--my friend the translator has been guided by an artistic rather than by a philosophical or ideological criterion, and for this I am grateful to him. And when I say that I am grateful to him, I mean that in this way he has best served the public that seeks to know me--me, the man, and not a system, for I have no system. Like Walt Whitman I would say of each one of my works: “This is not a book, it is a man.” It is comparatively easy, for example, to synthetize the philosophical system of Descartes, or that of Kant, or that of Hegel, or that of Comte, or, still more so, that of Spencer; but it is not easy to synthetize Goethe or Nietzsche, in both of whom is a latent philosophy. And still less so to synthetize Dante, Milton, Cervantes, Shakespeare. And it has not been the object of my translator to present a summary of an ideology but to give an impression of a spirit.

To elucidate this point still further would lead us into an intricate examination of the relations which subsist between a man and his work, and to inquire whether the man makes the work or the work makes the man or whether each makes the other at the same time. The man makes himself in making his work and the work makes itself in making the man. The Creation makes God the Creator, and God the Creator makes the Creation, the Universe.