“Man wishes to be eternal, and reason tells him he must die; from this contradiction comes the whole drama of the spirit.”
— Miguel de Unamuno[verifiable: The Tragic Sense of Life, chapters 1 and 2; translated by Crawford Flitch (1921)]
Commentary
This sentence sums up the argument of the book's opening chapters, in which Unamuno contrasts the spontaneous longing for eternal life with the rational knowledge of mortality. The contradiction is presented as the source of the characteristic tensions of the Western religious and literary imagination, and Unamuno finds its most powerful expression in Don Quixote. Paul Ilie (1967) shows how this drama shaped Unamuno's novels and essays, in which characters struggle to reconcile desire and knowledge. Colin Smith's studies of Unamuno's Spanish prose (1968) emphasise the rhetorical energy with which he presents the conflict, often through dialogue and paradox. The sentence is a clear statement of the book's argument, and the translation should be consulted for the precise wording.
Commentary
This sentence sums up the argument of the book's opening chapters, in which Unamuno contrasts the spontaneous longing for eternal life with the rational knowledge of mortality. The contradiction is presented as the source of the characteristic tensions of the Western religious and literary imagination, and Unamuno finds its most powerful expression in Don Quixote. Paul Ilie (1967) shows how this drama shaped Unamuno's novels and essays, in which characters struggle to reconcile desire and knowledge. Colin Smith's studies of Unamuno's Spanish prose (1968) emphasise the rhetorical energy with which he presents the conflict, often through dialogue and paradox. The sentence is a clear statement of the book's argument, and the translation should be consulted for the precise wording.