The Authentic Reactionary

  By Nicolás Gómez Dávila and Ramon Elani (Translator and Commentator) Arcana Europa, xxxiii + 206 Pages, ISBN 979-8986223414 “If I were not a communist, I would think like him in every way.”—Gabriel García Márquez The “renowned unknown” literary hermit Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) was born in Bogotá, Colombia, where he spent most of his life. A brilliant writer of aphorisms—which he called scholia, or “glosses”—Gómez Dávila was a scathing critic of everything his contemporaries regarded as unequivocally good: progress, democracy, egalitarianism, and technology. By the middle of the last century, he already sensed the civilized world was becoming “part bordello, part dungeon, and part circus.” Yet Gómez Dávila rejected the political solutions offered up by ideologues of both the Left and the Right, whose activism he identified as a fatal symptom of the modern mindset. Instead, he advocated and practiced a sort of “inner emigration,” which provided him a mental and spiritual redoubt