Scholia to an Implicit Text

Scholia to an Implicit Text by Nicolas Gomez-Davila, translated by Roberto Pinzon, 195 pages

Nicolas Gomez-Davila was born in Colombia, but spent much of his childhood in Paris, including two years in which he was bedridden with pneumonia.  Recovering and returning to his homeland, he set about assembling one of the largest private libraries in the country, which served him as a kind of secluded smithy in which he refined and shaped his volumes of aphorisms.  Scholia to an Implicit Text is thus far the only work of his to be published in an English translation.

A "defeated unbeliever" who turns modern skepticism back on itself, fishing "with a net of doubts", a careful crafter of sentences who insists on the importance of the sensuous and the liturgical, a romantic reactionary who knows that the past is irrecoverable but not unrepeatable, Gomez-Davila is profound and provocative and never, ever boring.  He is also not an ideologue - central to his worldview is the rejection of the distinctly modern belief that problems require solutions rather than understanding.  The values that Gomez-Davila treasures do not require defence because they are eternal and indestructible, whereas every sin is its own worst punishment, and therefore the twentieth century "will bequeath nothing but the traces of its hustle and bustle at the service of our filthiest desires."

It could be worse, of course, and will be, if Gomez-Davila is correct in his assessment that totalitarianism is the natural end of modernity, "the technification of politics."  "A totalitarian state is the structure into which societies crystallize under demographic pressures," when solitude and the inner life have been made impossible.  "The 'rational', the 'natural', the 'legitimate' are only that which is customary.  To live in compliance with an enduring political constitution, behaving according to enduring customs, surrounded by enduring objects, is the only way to believe in the legitimacy of the ruler, in the rationality of habitudes, and in the naturalness of things."  All that being rejected, the world is waiting, not for Pericles, but for another, doubtlessly very different, Pol Pot.