P
rince
of
A
sturias
A
wards
1981-2014. S
peeches
5
I believe that the humanities have been somewhat neglected in our time; there is beginning to be
a certain awareness of this fact and it is very grave that this is happening at the present time. The
humanities are the sciences of what is human. They are not just the classical languages in
which our roots lie. They are philosophy, history, literature, the grand interpretation of human
reality, the precise organ of its imaginative representation, of the relations between people and
most especially of the relation between man and woman. They are precisely these disciplines,
which, together with the natural disciplines, compose what Dilthey called the intellectual globe.
They are the other half of the intellectual globe.
That is already happening, we are heading towards barbarism, the Spanish Minister claims in the
humanities, but the simple child, pimp of Two Thousand, does not frequent science or patient
history, but kills Martians and murders another child. That is why it is appropriate, and not just a
flower show, that a noble Foundation, with its plural gaze, distinguishes among the maps the good,
tall man, and the symbolic woman, and enthrones the eternal, dun grammar and the nylon epic of
some statesman.
We are surrounded, I’m not afraid to say so; robots, missiles and the old gods have armed their
war against the old Europe. The United States, ever predators, invent for themselves every day
a black enemy who has breakfasted poorly. Asturias is Europe, this theatre is Europe, douar of
intellectuals, pashanate of wise men, emirate of elders who still notice books. We are surrounded,
I’m not afraid to say so; and we have to create a militia, militiamen of Persia, let us be the men/
book of seasoned Bradbury, let us recite by heart the vengeance of Orestes, let us cite Ortega, the
watchman of the West, let us learn grammar like Greek toddlers and let us die slowly conjugating
the rose.
Francisco Umbral
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Literature
1996
Julián Marías Aguilera
—
Prince of Asturias Award
for Communication and
Humanities
1996
Excerpt from the speech given on
the occasion of receiving the Prince
of Asturias Award for Literature
on 8/11/1996.
Excerpt from the speech given on the
occasion of receiving the Prince of
Asturias Award for Communication
and Humanities on 8/11/1996.
