The shrinks call such thinking an “external locust of control,” while Lovecraft agnostics likely imagine it a conspiracy by a many-tentacled and ancient merman. We have all, at one point in our lives or another, indulged in the idea that something, some force, is at work, and that this malevolent anima mundi is working against us instead of to our advantage. Unamuno is laying the groundwork for a meditation on creation and creators, on self-actualization and self-immolation, and the result is a conglomeration of thought that should be of intellectual and emotional sustenance to everyone from lapsed Catholics to dyed in the wool atheists. This motionlessness will be familiar to many modern readers from hours spent playing video games like The Sims, games that some believe mirror our own real-life existence, but there is more at work here than mere Musk-style simulation theory. He is also on fire, on point, and knows exactly where he is going, whether he realizes it or not.Īt the start of Niebla, we find the male suitor Augusto standing at the door of his house, his body fixed in an "august and statuesque attitude." He does not seem capable of moving of his own accord or making his own decisions his only choice is to wait for a dog to pass, resolving to follow the dog in whatever direction it takes him. Whether writing of Cervantes' crowning creation, Don Quixote, or the agony of Christendom, the infamous rector is impassioned, distracted, and all over the place. This is a book by Miguel de Unamuno and anyone familiar with the late Spanish essayist can tell you, that means it is a psychic stew. It is also, arguably, a philosophical treatise on Creationism, Christianity, Simulation hypothesis, and the right to die by one's own hand. The book, written in 1907 and first published in 1914, concerns an introverted intellectual who falls for the wrong woman, only to discover that his significant wealth cannot buy her love. Unamuno's most notorious “nivola” (a term coined by Unamuno to describe a work shorter than a novel and longer than a traditional novella), Niebla, AKA 'Mist,' AKA 'Fog,' is a work that largely eluded an English-speaking audience until the dawn of the twenty-first century.
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