Albert Gallegos, the older brother of Dave Gallegos, my classmate, was getting a Master's Degree in Spanish literature.  During the summer of 1962, he was taking a class on Miguel de Unamuno.  He talked all the time about him, so that we began to call him Unamuno.  I never knew much about Unamuno so that I had to look it up.  Miguel de Unamuno was a Spanish essayist, novelist, poet, playwright, philosopher, professor of Greek and Classics, and later rector at the University of Salamanca.  In addition to his writing, Unamuno played an important role in the intellectual life of Spain.  He served as rector of the University of Salamanca for two periods: from 1900 to 1924 and 1930 to 1936, during a time of great social and political upheaval.  Unamuno's philosophy was not systematic but rather a negation of all systems and an affirmation of faith "in itself."  He developed intellectually under the influence of rationalism and positivism, but during his youth he wrote articles that clearly showed his sympathy for socialism and his great concern for the situation in which he found Spain at that time.  An important concept for Unamuno was intrahistoria.  He thought that history could best be understood by looking at the small histories of anonymous people, rather than by focusing on major events such as wars and political pacts.  In the late nineteenth century Unamuno left the positivist philosophy school of thought.  Then, in the early twentieth century, he developed his own thinking influenced by existentialism.  Life was tragic, according to Unamuno, because of the knowledge that we are to die.  He explained much of human activity as an attempt to survive, in some form, after our own death.  He provided a stimulating discussion of the differences between faith and reason in his most famous work: Del sentimiento trágico de la vida (The Tragic Sense of Life, 1912), along with La agonía del cristianismo (The Agony of Christianity, 1931) and his novella San Manuel Bueno, mártir (Saint Emmanuel the Good, Martyr, 1930).  After his youthful sympathy for socialism ended, Unamuno gravitated towards liberalism.  Unamuno was probably the best Spanish connoisseur of Portuguese culture, literature, and history of his time.  He believed it was as important for a Spaniard to become familiar with the great names of Portuguese literature as well as with those of the Catalan literature.  He believed that the Iberian countries should come together through the exchange of the manifestations of the spirit, but he was openly against any type of Iberian Federalism.  His significance is that he was one of a number of notable interwar intellectuals who resisted the intrusion of ideology into Western intellectual life.  For Unamuno, the art of poetry was a way of expressing spiritual problems.  His themes were the same in his poetry as in his other fictional works, spiritual anguish, the pain provoked by the silence of God, time, and death.  Have you ever heard of Unamuno?

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