La madurez del espíritu comienza cuando dejamos de sentirnos encargados del mundo.
Spiritual maturity begins when we stop feeling like we have to take care of the world.
by Nicolás Gómez Dávila
1,895 escolios from the Colombian recluse. Nicolás Gómez Dávila spent his life in a room of 30,000 books, writing glosses to a text he never wrote. He was discovered in German translation. Colombia forgot him.
tags: gomezdavila, colombia, aphorism, modernity, conservatism, scholios, bogota, latin-america, catholicism, reaction
ESCOLIOS A UN TEXTO IMPLÍCITO
1913 - 1994
BOGOTÁ · COLOMBIA
THE MAN
Born in Bogotá in 1913, taken to Paris at six, returned at twenty-three with a library. Never left Colombia again. He refused the National Order of Merit, never taught, never lectured. He called himself el reaccionario auténtico- the authentic reactionary.
He spent his adult life in a room of 30,000 books, reading and writing aphorisms he called escolios - glosses to a text he never wrote. His contemporaries discovered him in German translation. Ernst Jünger called him one of the great minds of the century.
THE WORK
The Escolios are not maxims or proverbs. Each is a reaction - a gloss in the margin of an implied text: the accumulated writing of modern civilization that Gómez Dávila read and refused. He published almost nothing in his lifetime. The first volume appeared in 1977; the last posthumously in 2005.
His conservatism was not political but metaphysical. He defended beauty, hierarchy, the sacred, and the particular against the universal, the functional, and the democratic. He was, in his own words, un pasajero en tránsito- a passenger in transit.
1895 aphorisms · five volumes · 1977–1992 · arrow-keys to turn pages
La madurez del espíritu comienza cuando dejamos de sentirnos encargados del mundo.
Spiritual maturity begins when we stop feeling like we have to take care of the world.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) was a Colombian philosopher and aphorist who spent his life in a private library of 30,000 volumes in Bogotá, writing short texts he called escolios - glosses or annotations to an implied text he never wrote. The implied text is modernity: its premises, its confidence, its self-evidence. The escolios are his reactions.
He was taken to Paris at six and educated there until his early twenties, returning with the beginnings of a library that would eventually fill his Bogotá house. He never taught, never lectured, refused every official recognition. In 1977, at sixty-four, he published the two volumes of Escolios a un Texto Implícito. He remained almost unknown in Colombia until long after his death.
What happened instead: German translators found him. Ernst Jünger read the German editions and called him one of the great minds of the century. He was taken up by Central European conservatives, Catholic intellectuals, by anyone searching for a voice that refused the century's flatteries without retreating into nostalgia. In Colombia, a country he never left, he remained invisible.
He called himself el reaccionario auténtico - the authentic reactionary. His targets were not political parties but metaphysical dispositions: the belief that the universe is improvable by human will, that equality is the condition of dignity, that the individual precedes the community, that the present surpasses the past. Against these he placed beauty, hierarchy, the sacred, the particular, the contemplative life.
The escolios are not proverbs. They do not console or advise. They are records of a mind reacting to things it has read - a kind of perpetual marginalia. They assume the reader has read the same texts and found the same problems.
Bogotá · Paris · 30,000 volumes · never left
Born - Bogotá, Colombia
Born into a wealthy Bogotá family. His father was a lawyer and public official.
Paris - Moves to France aged six
Educated at home by private tutors in Paris. Acquires French as a second native language. Begins the reading that never stops.
Returns to Bogotá - Begins the library
Returns to Colombia, aged around twenty-three, with the beginnings of what becomes a library of 30,000 volumes. Does not leave again.
The great reading - silence, no publication
Reads philosophy, theology, literature, history. Writes in private. Publishes nothing. Rejects academic life. Refuses every official position offered to him.
Textos I - privately circulated
A small edition of philosophical texts circulated among friends. Never republished. The escolios are forming.
Escolios a un Texto Implícito - Vol. I & II published
First public publication of the escolios. Published by Instituto Colombiano de Cultura, Bogotá. Over 2,000 aphorisms. He is sixty-four.
Discovered by German translators
German editions begin. Ernst Jünger reads him and calls him one of the finest minds of the century. Gómez Dávila remains in Bogotá, indifferent to fame.
Sucesivos Escolios a un Texto Implícito - published
Third major volume. He is seventy-nine. His readership in Germany and Central Europe is now substantial; in Colombia, he remains almost unknown.
Dies - Bogotá
One day before his eighty-first birthday. He never left Colombia after returning from Paris sixty years earlier. His study of 30,000 books is intact.
Escolios: Selección - Villegas Editores
Posthumous selection with photographs of his library and study. First wide Colombian edition. The world catches up.
The word escolio comes from the Greek scholion - a marginal annotation, a note in the margin of a manuscript. Medieval scribes would write scholia in the margins of classical texts: glosses, explanations, arguments with the author. Gómez Dávila adopted the form for his own peculiar purpose.
His implied text is never identified. Every escolio assumes you know the passage being annotated. The reader supplies the context from their own reading. The result is a kind of test: if you recognize what is being reacted to, the escolio opens; if not, it closes.
He is one of the few writers in Spanish whose reputation was made entirely abroad, in translation, before being recognized at home. The Bogotá he inhabited - wealthy, Catholic, bookish, cut off from the twentieth century's bustle - no longer exists. His library may have been dispersed.
Bogotá · never catalogued · never left · click a spine
✦ memory · ☽ night · ∞ loops · ❧ margins · ◆ proof
a personal library in perpetual arrangement · MMXXVI