A lo largo de las décadas, por una conjunción de factores, Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994) se ha mantenido en la periferia. O, quizás, en un discreto segundo plano. Aunque es poco recordado como escritor en los medios de comunicación, su obra posee un magnetismo tan poderoso que cuenta con fieles lectores y verdaderos especialistas en Colombia, Chile, Argentina, México, Alemania, Italia y España. Y es muy probable que tenga lectores en otros lugares y también en otros idiomas.

Gómez Dávila nació y murió en Bogotá. Vivió parte de su infancia, adolescencia y primera infancia en París. Cuando regresó a su ciudad, a la edad de veintitrés años, era un joven precozmente culto. Sabía griego y latín, había leído a decenas de autores de literatura clásica y había dado grandes pasos hacia su meta de leer en varios idiomas. Quienes han estudiado su biblioteca -ahora bajo la custodia de la gran Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango de Bogotá- testifican no sólo que poseía más de treinta mil volúmenes, sino que sus estantes contenían volúmenes en francés, alemán, español, inglés, portugués. y otros idiomas. Si toda biblioteca proporciona información sobre la sensibilidad de sus propietarios, la de Gómez Dávila pinta el cuadro de un lector persistente, multifacético, refinado y multilingüe. Incluso sabemos que, en algún momento,

Poco se sabe del paso de Gómez Dávila por París. Durante dos años, debido a una enfermedad, fue educado por tutores particulares. Asistió a una escuela de monjes benedictinos, que seguramente fue la fuente de su persistente fe cristiana. No realizó estudios universitarios. Nacido en el seno de una familia de la alta sociedad bogotana, al regresar a su país tuvo que dedicar parte de su tiempo a la dirección de sus negocios. No solo eso: también frecuentaba el Jockey Club de Bogotá y mantenía cierta actividad social. Se casó y, de su unión con Emilia Nieto, nacieron tres hijos. La imagen de Gómez Dávila encerrado en su biblioteca, apartado del mundo y dedicado exclusivamente a leer y escribir, no es del todo correcta. Álvaro Mutis, Alberto Lleras Camargo, Hernando Téllez, Ernesto Volkening, y otros eran compañeros de conversación cercanos suyos. Es probable que estos amigos vieron crecer la biblioteca de Gómez Dávila; que fueron testigos de la exhaustividad con que conservó sus libros, ni un rasguño, ni una anotación. Y que quedaron sorprendidos por la amplitud y profundidad de sus conocimientos literarios, filosóficos, históricos, religiosos y científicos.

Devoto de la Lengua Española

Si tomamos como referencia la edición de Atalanta (España, 2009), que contiene cinco colecciones ( Escolios a un texto implícito 1 , Escolios a un texto implícito 2 , Nuevos escolios a un texto implícito 1 , Nuevos escolios a un texto implícito 2 , y Sucesivos escolios a un texto implícito ), podemos estimar que Gómez Dávila publicó entre 11.500 y 12.000 escolios, o “escolio” en inglés. Cada uno es una pieza de sugerente perfección: “El mundo entero se vuelve opaco cuando se nos ensucian los ojos”. Cada uno es un artefacto brillante, hábilmente elaborado: “El orden es el más frágil de los hechos sociales”. Cada uno está dotado de una voluntad inalienable de movilizar el pensamiento: “Nadie es ridículo en su lugar; cualquiera está en un lugar que no es el suyo.”

De entrada, el hecho de que Gómez Dávila evitara el término “aforismo” y optara por el de “escolio” —un comentario, una nota que pretende explicar— sugiere la extrema conciencia, la precisión de relojero con la que emplea el idioma español: “ Cuanto más generalizamos, más crecen los errores, la inanidad, el tedio”. No hay desperdicio, nunca hay una palabra de más. Cualquiera que intente el ejercicio de cortar incluso una sola palabra de cualquiera de los escolios encontrará que se derrumban o pierden su significado. Gómez Dávila escribe —decanta, limpia, pule— sus escolios (“El escritor que no ha torturado sus frases tortura al lector”) para ejercer un control total de lo que quiere decir: “Comprender es no rozar el frase, sino aferrarse a ella.” Y precisamente porque supone que los excesos del lenguaje conllevan sus propios peligros,

Parece paradójico: el hombre que se formó a través del intercambio de diversas lenguas, que leyó obras antiguas en griego y latín, que exploró los clásicos principalmente en traducción francesa antes de desentrañar otras lenguas, hizo del español su brillante vehículo expresivo. Su preciso esbozo de conjuntos en español (“La historia no conoce soluciones, sólo situaciones”); demarca (“El léxico filosófico se divide en palabras para pensar y palabras para pensar que pensamos”); y también adopta la plasticidad necesaria para pensar la vida misma (“Madurar es mirar crecer el número de cosas sobre las que parece grotesco opinar, a favor o en contra”).

La escultura de los Escolios

En 1959, Gómez Dávila publicó el único libro que recopila sus obras de “prosa continua”. En un ensayo que apenas llega a las dos páginas, elogia, pero también toma distancia, del género de la novela, que “ignora iniciaciones caprichosas e interrupciones repentinas, mientras que otras artes, por el contrario, saben seleccionar fragmentos abruptos de la existencia”. para levantarlos, incomparables, suspendidos, en el espacio estético que los absuelve de su vulgar nexi.” Este dardo lanzado contra la aspiración de continuidad, de la visión total que es el signo de la novela, me sugiere esto: en el universo de los autores que gravitan hacia los escolios, salvo Dostoievski, apenas se siente la presencia de los narradores.

In one of his texts of continuous prose, he writes, “If I had to choose from the greatest of all books, I would choose the History of the Peloponnesian War.” In one of the scholia, he talks about other great fondnesses of his: “My patron saints: Montaigne and Burckhardt.” Thucydides, Tertullian, Pascal, Montaigne, Burckhardt, Kant, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, de Maistre, Barres, Maurras, Kierkegaard, Renan, Donoso Cortés, and more: these are a few, just a few, of the authors who, according to scholars, might be present, in affinity, in spirit, in the work of Gómez Dávila.

For years and years, in the silence of his library, our man read and wrote. He took notes in notebooks: in this way, he took the first steps that would lead to the creation of each scholium. The idea of the “implicit text,” it seems to me, might be mistaken. For example, try reading each scholium associated with a work or an author or a given thesis. The scholia are an autonomous product, the fruit of constant mental exercise, the thoughts of a man who lived in thought, the thoughts of a man who accumulated hundreds of thousands of pages of reading, hundreds of thousands of hours of writing. Gómez Dávila did not respond to the thought of others; rather, he built his own path, as personal as could be: “The cultured man is not one who goes around heavy with answers, but one who is capable of questions.”

Gómez Dávila’s method—if we can call it that—is not that of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799), who summarized the filtration of the everyday in his Notebooks: in its pages, there are not only aphorisms, but also a variety of anecdotes, occurrences, letters, and phrases with no clear meaning, perhaps designed to serve as reminders for other possible writings. Nor is it the method of Voces [Voices], by the Italian-Argentine Antonio Porchia (1885-1968), who made the format of the aphorism the vehicle of his poetic, autobiographical, imaginative, and ludic doings (Borges wrote of Porchia: “We might suspect that the author wrote them for himself”).

Gómez Dávila’s process seems closer to that of Elias Canetti, the author of that immense work—a crowning document of the twentieth century—that is his Apuntes [Notes]. In 1942, once he planned the research and writing of Masa y poder [Mass and power], Canetti created an autonomous work composed of brief annotations and aphorisms. When Canetti, seventeen years later, finished his project in 1959, he understood that he would never leave this practice behind. And so it was. Like Gómez Dávila, he dedicated himself to producing an autonomous, brilliant, and versatile body of work, an unwavering projection of the richness of his life as a man of letters.

God, the Man, the Thought

Nicolás Gómez Dávila followed no program of thought. In the ocean of his scholia there are issues that return, always reinvented, apparitions more than re-apparitions, revisions of the background, even, new points of view. Without a doubt, God is the axial subject of the scholia. At the start of his first book, we soon read: “For God there is nothing but individuals.” Twelve scholia later, he writes: “Any end different from God dishonors us.” Somewhere else, his message takes another path: “God is the truth of all illusions.” Or this, which we could read as a gesture of provocation: “God himself is the author of certain blasphemies.”

If we had to extract and organize all the scholia that name God, would we end up with some theology or, at least, a collection of principles? I don’t think so. The scholia, more than messages, are inquiries. Constructions that interrogate. In them, God does not remain immovable. Sometimes he is a humanized God (“The thirst of the great, the noble, the beautiful, is an unknown appetite of God”). In certain scholia, he is a less determinant entity: “God ends up as a parasite in the souls where ethics prevail.” In others, he is a being who opens the field for a philosophical debate: “We can only forgive God for the impertinence of forgiving because he understands.” But Gómez Dávila is not a fanatic, but a thinker who recognizes the risks of extreme faith: “He who is not willing to violate his principles every now and then, more than a martyr, ends up a murderer.”

At the same time, in a recurring way in all five books, Gómez Dávila displays a severe, cutting attitude toward men. The following succession of eight scholia suggests the plasticity and power of his critiques: “Man believes his impotence is the measure of things.” “To challenge God, man inflates his emptiness.” “We all try to buy off our voice, to refer to sin as mistakes or misfortune.” “Human is the adjective that serves to pardon any vileness.” “Man is more capable of heroic acts than decent acts.” “Vulgarity consists, basically, of being on familiar terms with Plato and Goethe.” “Most men die before their souls are born.” And, in my opinion the most terrible of his scholia, an incursion into the territories of nihilism: “The Antichrist is, probably, man.”

A third and insistent current to which I’d like to call attention, where it seems to me that Gómez Dávila’s thought reaches its greatest heights of beauty and sophistication, are the scholia dedicated to thought. They are thoughts about thought. Each one of the pieces I note below is, in its demanding brevity, the synthesis of a journey, but also an incitement to take leadership and press onward: “Nothing is more difficult than keeping an idea from leaving the place where it’s true.” “Immanent is, in the background, what we can define. Transcendent, what we can only describe.” “The calculable is subaltern.” “The myth corrects the precision of the concept.” “Once the sensation looks at itself, it becomes perverted.” “The truth of the paradoxical is experimental.” “Seen from inside, nothing is completely empty.” “The idea developed in a system commits suicide.” Gómez Dávila was interested in how we reason, how we use language, how we construct arguments to understand errors and weaknesses. I would go further: he was unsettled by the provisional nature of our relationships with God, with other humans, and with the word.

Darts and Desires

The quantity and diversity of the thought collected in the scholia is inexhaustible. Its paths weave in and out from all directions. Faith: “What we believe unites or separates us less than the way we believe it.” Social norms: “Society rewards garish virtues and discreet vices.” Criticism: “He who does not understand that two perfectly contrary attitudes can both be perfectly justified shouldn’t bother with criticism.” Human conduct: “Vanity is not affirmation, but interrogation.” Religiosity: “The Catholic must simplify his life and complicate his thought.” The tension between good and evil: “Evil doesn’t defeat like seduction, but like vertigo.” Philosophy: “A philosophy overcomes another when it defines with greater precision the same unsolvable mystery.” Romanticism: “Romanticism essentially expresses the desire to not be here: here in this place, here in this century, here in this world.” The problematization of the world: “True problems have not a solution but a story.”

A wide current in the scholia takes the shape of a dart: against marxism (“The marxist inherited his disdain for defeats from the bourgeois disdain for failures”), against progressive intellectuals, against the destruction of hierarchies, against ignorance (“With him who is ignorant of certain books, there is no possible discussion”), against journalism (“reading the newspaper debases he who it doesn’t desensitize”), against academicism, against ideologies (“History, if we follow it with party member’s eyes instead of observing it with the eyes of the curious, sways us stupidly between nostalgia and ire”), against progressivism (“The progressive runs through literatures like the puritan runs through cathedrals: with hammer in hand”), and against many other phenomena.

Another current, which I would call the current of his desires, gives off the deep pleasure produced in him by the sequence of reading, thinking, and writing: “The devil cannot take control of the soul that knows how to smile.” “Nature is revived in the hands of the metaphor.” “Oneiric poetry does not foresee, it snores.” “The world is not intact, nor abandoned.” “Each work of art answers a question that does not precede it.” “Aesthetic pleasure is the supreme criterion for well-born souls.” From this stream of his desires, one phrase deserves to be lifted out and shown off, since it is one of his most splendid achievements: “To refuse to admire is the mark of the beast.”

So Everything Is Open

In the final pages of Textos [Texts]—I’m looking at the edition published by Atalanta in 2010—Gómez Dávila includes “El reaccionario auténtico” [The authentic reactionary], in which he outlines the figure of the reactionary, in contrast to the figure of the progressive, in two variants: the liberal and the radical. It is a text that, additionally, presents a vision of history as the articulation of countless “free acts and dialectical processes.” In the closing of this memorable essay, he formulates a double boundary: “If the progressive flows toward the future, and the conservative toward the past, the reactionary doesn’t measure his desires by the history of yesterday nor by the history of tomorrow. The reactionary does not laud what the next dawn will bring, nor does he cling to the final shadows of the night. His dwelling is raised in that luminous space where the essences question him with their immortal presences.” The text closes with this brief paragraph: “The reactionary is not the nostalgic dreamer of extinguished pasts, but the hunter of sacred shadows on the eternal hills.” In a scholium that can be read as a verdict of himself, Gómez Dávila writes: “Reactionary thought is impotent and lucid.”

Elias Canetti escribió un elogio preciso y bien argumentado de Blaise Pascal. Sus Pensamientos no sólo han mantenido su natural frescura a lo largo de los siglos (“Todas las frases, cortas y largas, todos los fragmentos de sus frases son como los de hoy”), sino más importante aún: aunque son contundentes, dejar siempre una puerta abierta. Esa misma legitimidad, que no exige pactar con cada escolio, es clara en la obra de Gómez Dávila. Quien lo lea experimentará el rigor, la mente escrutadora, el pedaleo de su pensamiento. Él no se repite. Evita toda gratuidad. Nunca dice: esta es la última palabra. Nunca nos da un escolio que no tenga un sentido, una pregunta, una invitación, casi una exigencia, que nos obligue a seguir pensando.

Traducido por Arthur Dixon