Essays and soliloquies — Text and Context

A Self-Declared Anti-Theorist

Unamuno explicitly rejects the label of savant or theorist. In the essay “Large and Small Towns,” he writes: “I have no theories. I have only impressions and sensations.” He treats the subject of urban scale “from the point of view of purely personal opinion and individual impression,” dismissing the conventional habit of “basing our assertions upon authority” as a way to give them “a deceptive air of objectivity.” This stance is consistent throughout the excerpts: Unamuno privileges the subjective, the passionate, and the idiosyncratic over systematic argument. He cites George Meredith’s The Egoist to support his view that great cities “de-individualize, or rather de-personalize, us,” but immediately undercuts any claim to objectivity by noting that his friend Ramiro de Maeztu calls him “an incorrigible egotist.”

The City as Leveler

Unamuno’s critique of large cities is not sociological but existential. He argues that “great cities are levelling; they lift up the low and depress the high; they exalt mediocrity and abase superlativeness.” The mechanism is “the action of the mass, as powerful in social life as in chemistry.” He contrasts this with his experience in Salamanca, a city of some thirty thousand souls, where he found conditions favorable to “studying, meditating, writing, battling for culture in the public arena.” He endorses Guglielmo Ferrero’s conclusion that for “the life of the spirit, small cities of a population like that of Salamanca are the best.” Yet Unamuno adds a caveat: the quality of the spirit matters. The monastic cloister, he notes, can “in certain exceptional cases exalted the spirit by its arduous discipline.”

Don Quixote’s New Mission

In the closing excerpt, Unamuno reimagines Don Quixote’s role for the modern world. The knight’s mission, he writes, is “to cry aloud, to cry aloud in the wilderness. But the wilderness hears, though men do not hear, and one day it will be transformed into a sounding forest, and this solitary voice that falls upon the wilderness like seed, will yield a gigantic cedar.” The passage echoes the preface’s setting: Unamuno himself is writing from a barren island, a voice in the wilderness. He also notes that when the world wished to make Don Quixote king, he would have fled, “as Christ retired alone to the mountain when, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they sought to proclaim Him king.” The parallel suggests Unamuno’s own resistance to institutional power and his embrace of a prophetic, marginal stance.

The excerpts reveal a writer who consistently undercuts his own authority even as he asserts strong opinions. Readers should approach Essays and Soliloquies not as a systematic treatise but as a series of passionate, personal meditations. Unamuno’s distrust of anthologies is itself a clue: the selection is the translator’s, and the author’s voice remains fragmentary, intense, and deliberately unsystematic. The collection rewards those who read for tone and gesture rather than for doctrine.

Reading Unamuno’s insistence on the personal over the systematic, I remembered being at my grandfather’s desk, his marginalia in a dog-eared French anthology. He underlined similar cries against abstraction. Later, Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian — A Closer Reading brought back that same ink-smell, that same hush of a mind arguing with itself, not for an audience, but out of sheer, stubborn communion. The quixotic loneliness felt familiar.