Word: unamuno
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Juan Marichal, professor of Romance Languages and Lite atures, will mark the centennial of Miguel de Unamuno tonight with a speech on "Unamuno and the Liberal Recovery" at 8 p.m. in Boylston Auditorium...
Reason Kills. Unamuno finally won an appointment to the University of Salamanca, where a faithful band of students doted on him. "My one desire," he told them, "is not to give you ideas of my own or of others; ideas have little value-but to strike the untouched chords in the psalters of your hearts." But he struck others where it hurt, since he believed that people thought best when they were angriest. Addressing the clergy, he praised heretics. Speaking to Communists, he ostentatiously crossed himself, shouting "Christ be praised!" He challenged all parties and creeds and was never worried...
When the mild dictator, Primo de Rivera, came to power in 1923, Unamuno attacked him mercilessly. Rivera finally packed Unamuno off to the Canary Islands, where he enjoyed a comfortable exile and turned out 103 sonnets. When Rivera was ousted in 1930, Unamuno returned to Spain. But he found the new republic no more to his taste. He welcomed Franco's rebellion, adding that civil war would be good for Spain. In 1936, just before his death, he turned against Franco...
...Unamuno's countrymen adored him without ever quite understanding him. And Unamuno, in truth, is not easy to understand. Words often poured from him in a formless rush; he was hostile to reason. The pure rationalist, he insisted, is no more fit to comment on life than the eunuch is fit to judge a beauty contest. In Tragic Sense of Life he wrote, "The mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it; it seeks to congeal the flowing stream in blocks of ice. In order to understand anything, it is necessary to kill...
...Unamuno put his trust in human passion, and even his driest philosophical speculation is passionately alive. On the other hand, Unamuno failed to see that passions can lead to sheer brutality, as they did in the Spanish Civil War. Unamuno liked to compare himself to Don Quixote in his contradictions and paradoxes, and his critics have accepted the analogy. "He was refined and savage," said one, "modern and medieval, with the unction of an apostle and the wisdom of a picaro, a man in whom all the defects and virtues of the Spanish race seem to culminate...