"To mature is not to renounce our longings, but to admit that the world is not bound to fill them."

The life and work of the Colombian philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994) slowly became the boundaries of his house's in Bogota library, which housed more than thirty thousand volumes and was read – always in his original language, whether Latin, Greek, French, English or German – in long sessions ranging from the early hours of the day until the early hours of the day. While I was read, he used to write a series of notes, or scolios, through which he developed his unique thinking in the form of aphorisms, which earned him the well-deserved title of "Colombian Nietzsche".

Always true to his own formula, "to live with lucidity a simple, quiet, discreet life among intelligent books", not forgetting that every life is "a failed experiment", Dávila built one of the most clairvoyant and ferocious philosophical critiques of modernity, which aroused the admiration of writers so close to his unprejudged sensibility as Ernst Janger, or Botho Strauss. However, it is not easy to classify this independent thinker; does not fit into the topical label of the nostalgic conservative. He himself self-defines himself as an "authentic reactionary", for, as he claimed to avoid misunderstandings, when there is nothing to keep one becomes reactionary and reacts against everything.

The book that the reader has in his hands, a careful selection of José Miguel Serrano and Gonzalo Muñoz made from the more than ten thousand aphorisms that make up his complete work Escolios to an implicit text (No. 38 of this same collection), reveals to us the essential lines of a lone thinker who set out to stay awake where most sleep.

Introduction: José Miguel Serrano
Selection: José Miguel Serrano and Gonzalo Muñoz

This work has been helped by the Ministry of Culture and Sport