This post will mostly be about Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, who was made rector or the Universidad de Salamanca three times in his life (the last time "rector for life"). He was a true man of letters, a philosopher, a novelist, and a lecturer in Greek at the University. He lived in Paris with Pascal, London with Dickens, and Copenhagen with Kierkegaard (he learned Danish, just to read Kierkegaard in the original language...). He got his Ph. D. at age 21 in Letters from the University of Madrid, writing his dissertation of the problems in the origins of the Basque race (he was a Basque, originally from Bilbao).
I recently visited his house, and what I'm gonna do is post some quotes and data along with the photos I took.
This is the old inscription on the wall right outside his house, "Universitas Studii Salamantini"...
And La fachada universitaria (the façade of the old university), con la escondida rana, a little sculpture of a frog that is carved on the wall. The rumor is that if you don't find the frog when you look for it, you will fail your first year of exams...
Inside the Unamuno house, with the portrait of him...
In 1923, Unamuno was exiled to Fuerteventura, in the Canary Islands, by the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera for his critical comments of the general. He was almost immediately recued by one H. Dumay, editor of the Parisian literary magazine Le Quotidien, in his private yacht, who bore him back to Paris.
Before leaving Salamanca, on February 24, 1924, Unamuno's students mobbed the train station platform. Unamuno said to them, "Volveré no con mi libertad, que nada vale, sino con la vuestra." ("I will return, not with my liberty, which is worth nothing, but with yours.")
This is Unamuno's typewriter, which was given to him as a gift, and which he never used. He wrote all of his novels, essays, and plays, including San Manuel Bueno, Mártir, Niebla, Del Sentimiento Trágico de la Vida, and Vida de Quijote y Sancho, in longhand...
Unamuno said,
"Como yo, fundalmentalmente no soy más que palabra, el no hablar es morir y francamente, a morir no estoy dispuesto...." (11-18-1917).
"Because I, fundamentally, am no more than words, to not speak would be to die, and frankly, I'm not disposed to dying...."
This is his library, which had something like 6,000 volumes in about 12 different languages. Some choice titles were The Value and Destiny of the Individual by Bernard Bosarquet, and The Oxford Movement by Dean Church.
And Unamuno's desk, where he wrote all the novels...
And here, the troubled genius, at that very desk...
And Unamuno on his bed, reading, my reflection artfully included...
And the statue of Unamuno, in the plaza de Monterrey in Salamanca, across from the bar-café "Niebla".
In 1936, Unamuno gave a passionate anti-Franco speech in the Paraninfo, a lecture hall at the University. Immediately after, he was escorted out by a platoon of Franco's soldiers. He was placed under house-arrest, and died about 6 weeks later.
Basically, the point is, sometimes people are so incredibly awesome that the Spaniads make words out of people's names, such that Unamuno, for example, has had the word "unamuniano," or, "unamunian", made from his name. And that's pretty much my new life goal. "Whelaniano."
