Unamuno and Blake

"Del sentimiento trágico de la vida" (The Tragic Sense of Life) by Miguel de Unamuno, Trans. J. E. Crawford

"Yes, perhaps, as the Sage says, "nothing worthy proving can be proven, nor yet disproven"; but can we restrain that instinct which urges man to wish to know, and above all to wish to know the things which may conduce to life, to eternal life? Eternal life, not eternal knowledge, as the Alexandrian gnostic said. For living is one thing and knowing is another; and, as we shall see, perhaps there is such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything vital is anti-rational, not merely irrational, and that everything rational is anti-vital. And this is the basis of the tragic sense of life."

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Blake's Urizen (Your Reason) tries to measure what cannot be measured and restrain what cannot be restrained: the poetic imagination, eternal life. Blake says, "Mock on, mock on Voltaire, Rousseau"--the rationalist mockery of spirit is just so much sand against the wind.