Curmudgeonly Advice for Modern Problems from deceased Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Q: A number of years ago I dreamed I was swimming with the great writer Mary Oliver and she swam directly over to me and said, “I have something for you in my hands underwater. Take them”–I then woke up, whatever she had been holding an eternal mystery. So I have two questions. a) What dd Mary Oliver have in her hands? b) Why is it that we have some dreams that feel so much more real than anything, even the most beautiful or traumatic events in real life? I don’t know what to make of this.

A: Dear reader:

Life is delicious in those moments when one allows oneself to think or dream. I can give you an answer, though as for the first portion of your question, it may not be as precise as you’d hoped. Certain ideas are only clear when formulated, others only when alluded to. Allusion is the only way to express the intimate without distorting it. The deepest spiritual experiences do not come from intense intellectual meditations, but from lucky visions of something real. In the lararium of the soul we do not worship great gods, but fragments of phrases, pieces of dreams.

All certainty leaves us melancholic. A furtive bitterness hides in all abolished mystery; all knowledge grieves us. All happiness is longing, seeking, desire, love.

Sleep imbues some things with a strange interior light that reveals a possible depth indetectable during the day. When we try to clearly recall a dream, its strange meaning eludes us. Perhaps too easily we presume to see things clearly in the day, and have in fact lost hold of a more authentic knowledge that requires its own form of experience.