One doesn’t have to be Catholic, an existentialist, Spanish, nor indeed even a “believer” of any sort, to appreciate Miguel de Unamuno. One only needs an appreciation of a distinctive quality of mind — but that intellectual virtue, what with the prevailing lazy abridgments characteristic of ideologues, usually squawking the loudest — is in short supply…
You can always tell employees of the government by the total vacancy which occupies the space where most other people have faces — John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces [t]he bewildering mechanisms of power in stories such as The Trial also “point to something much more sinister”—the idea that arcane bureaucracies become self-perpetuating and…
Immersed in reading Percy it has become blindingly clear that these two writers have such similar concerns. de Unamuno’s the Tragic Sense of Life rates as having made the most profound of impressions upon me — and that was going on thirty years ago. Whatever else separates Percy and de Unamuno, it is my view that de…
manwithoutqualities 