Outside Reading

I am kind of on an Unamuno tangent, so to speak, but I wanted to share some of his thoughts and what they mean to me. In Chapter 1 "the Man of Flesh and Bone," the thing that Unamuno is the most afraid of is his complete annihilation, or nothingness after death. He states that when he was a youth, he "remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious appetite of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics put it." For him, even hell would be a viable place to be because at least he would be 'existing'. I found this to be a rather astonishing choice, one that many, including myself, would not necessarily consider. However, in the context that Unamuno put it, the choice between nothingness and hell, it would make sense that he would chose hell so he could somehow keep existing.