NOTEBOOKS 1—3

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Throughout his adult life, Martí kept notebooks, sometimes no more than assorted scraps of paper stitched together by hand. (The pages of Notebook 14 were cut from old U.S. War Department weather maps.) He jotted down everything: snatches of poetry, citations from books he was reading, random thoughts, aphorisms (his own and other people’s), the addresses of friends and contacts, arguments with himself or with a book, incidents from his day, jokes, and various other literary and philosophical musings in Spanish, French, English, Greek, Latin, and German. Twenty of these notebooks remain, and though it is sometimes difficult to date them precisely, they have been arranged in more or less chronological order; the first of them were clearly written during his student days in Madrid and Zaragoza, and the last during his final years in New York.

from NOTEBOOK 1 (1871)

Thought acts independently of the will to think. Sometimes I want to think but do not, and sometimes I think without wanting to, and then nothing is left of things but their images.

 

North Americans put utility before sentiment. We put sentiment before utility.

And when there is such difference in organization, life, being; when they were selling while we were weeping; when we exchange their cold and calculating head for our imaginative head, and their hearts made of cotton and ships with a heart so special, so sensitive, so new that it can only be called the Cuban heart, then how can you ask us to govern ourselves by the same laws with which they govern themselves?

We imitate. No! We copy. No! It is good, they tell us. It is American, we say. We believe because we need to believe. Our life does not resemble theirs, and on many points it must not become like theirs. Among us, sensibilities are extremely vehement. Our intelligence is less positive, our customs are purer: how can two different peoples be ruled by the same laws?

The American laws have given the North a high degree of prosperity and have also raised it to the highest degree of corruption. It has been metallized to make it prosper. Accursed be prosperity at such a cost!¹

 

And if the general state of enlightenment in the United States seduces you, despite the corruption and the glacial metallization, can’t we aspire to enlighten without corrupting? This is happening....

I want to educate a country that will save a drowning man and never go to Mass.

 

There is a soul in animals.

 

 

The Catholic priesthood is necessarily immoral.

There is no Providence.

Providence is nothing but the logical and precise result of our actions, facilitated or blocked by the actions of others.

If we accept the Catholic Providence then God would be an extremely overworked bookkeeper.

 

To prevent the abolishment of the death penalty, to seek to demonstrate its goodness, is to defend it. And, in truth, it takes a certain degree of courage to stand up for it—the same courage it takes to oppose the abolition of slavery.

From the moment I could feel, I have been horrified by this penalty. From the moment I could judge, I judged it to be completely immoral. I will never be known for my utilitarian solutions, but if there is one thing I know about utility, it is the complete uselessness of capital punishment.

And it seems to me that if I had had the misfortune to think and feel otherwise, I would never have dared say so.

Therefore I feel anguish when someone does say so. I feel pain because Karr‘s² original talent has come to champion a thing so bloody.

It may be an illusion of my overheated mind, but anything that advocates the death penalty seems to me to be stained with blood.

It is an illusion, those who advocate the death penalty would say with a laugh; but it now strikes me that it is not, and I firmly believe it is true.

Karr’s esprit wounds me, and frankly I regret not having more of it than he does in order to crush and do away with his.

Even as they preach progress, many progressives prostitute themselves, in the moral sense of that word.

If he were a Jesuit, he would have added immense numbers of men to the Company of Jesus.

Let us look calmly, with all the calm of pain, upon these inconveniences of talent. Without them, the law of harmony, the immutable principle of equilibrium, would not be present in all things.

November 1871

from NOTEBOOK 2 (circa 1872-73)

Life is undoubtedly a contradiction. We desire what we cannot obtain; we want what we shall not have; and no contradiction could exist without the existence of two distinct and opposing forces.

For a book: ME.

My ideas about my own feelings are a little confused. Sometimes I acknowledge that I am good. Sometimes I berate myself angrily and exasperate myself because I think that wicked or egotistical thoughts are arising within me.

I must go inside myself and see myself for myself. I must be the one to analyze who I am; I must know myself; with my own will and my brave or weak nature, convinced of my absolute independence; I must found my own knowledge of myself, and overthrow all other ideas stemming from vanity or egotism.

I believe in the divinity of my essence; I feel and watch and believe in the wretchedness of my existence. And yet I seem, involuntarily, to acquiesce in my own wretchedness. What am I?

An absolute conviction. What I am I do not owe to myself. I was not born from my own will. Whatever in me is of worth I did not give to myself. What there is in me is mine only insofar as it temporarily exists within me. I am what I am, but I am not responsible for a spirit I could not choose; I cannot pride myself on a soul I did not create. Now I write....

From NOTEBOOK 3 (1874-78)

Bakunin,³ the Russian revolutionary.

Disciple of Panlof, who introduced Russia to the philosophy of Schelling.⁴

Stanekevith, youthful and eloquent, brought Hegel.

Belinsky,⁵ the steely critic, was the Russian Voltaire.

He conspires:—reviled—spat: assembled.

Bakunin’s collectivism: communism.

The communist municipal government: politically, subjected to an irresponsible ruler; administratively, to a standard functionary, implacable and impassible. Bakunin spoke in Berne: in Basel, he expanded his system.

Social Liquidation.

Collective ownership of the soil.

Common ownership of all instruments of labor.

Replacement of all political states with workers’ associations.

To restore Slavicism: Is that, in private, the whole Russian idea? To extend the domination of the Slavs: Is that what the internal decompositions of the empire will give rise to? The right thing to fear is something else: the nature of the vengeful democracy that advances in darkness. That which Bakunin brought to the dreamers of the West—for would he not take the wrathful form of the nascent Russian freedom to the discontented workers of the West? But will it not assuage this fear, truly assuage it, to think that while the powerful Russian aristocracy exhausts all its weapons against the heroic breast of the nihilists—freedom, with the French example and its majestic development in enlightened peace, will have solidly and irrevocably affirmed its conquests, infecting the attentive bordering countries with astonishment and hope?

The Slavophiles have not been at rest. How much money they gave to Taz! 1840. They had a great enemy in Chaadayev,⁶ the energetic and gloomy Hussar officer whom the czar declared mad.

The Slavophiles were divided: into Orthodox authoritarians and socialist republicans.

In Kornekoff, the former group had their rational constructor. The human will being powerless to rule mankind, all men must submit to the Greek church, vessel of the divine will. In Kireyevski,⁷ they had their mystic, kneeling on the ground with his arms outspread before the altar, as if awaiting, like the Brahmans, the hour of the eternal mingling, the eternal sinking of man, steeped in his Maker: Aham Brahma! Aksakov ⁸ was the man of the sword and the spear.

 

Velocipedes:—bicyctes. There is a factory that makes them now in Japan.

 

“But we cannot be lawyers if the law is taught in the schools”—a Guatemalan magistrate, on the promulgation of the Civil Code and my desire that it be taught in abridged form in the high schools.

Me—“Then let us be something else, my friend. The economic principle must be to the benefit of the many.”