THERE are two kinds of journalists: the one who lives captivated by the vortex of immediate events, always ready to provide an opinion about the last recent issue; and the one who, somehow immune to the demands of immediacy, tries to keep some distance from the events and makes more calm analysis. Journalist who are enslaved by novelty usually cannot be read after a few days or weeks. What they wrote becomes quickly outdated. But the second kind often provides insights and reflections that can be pleasantly read after many, many years. One of those rare analysts of Philippine society was Teodoro M. Kalaw, an intellectual I have written about several times before.

What attracted me to Kalaw from the beginning was the fact he wrote a very modern travel account in the modernista style that was in fashion in the Spanish-speaking world at the beginning of the 20th century. In the company of the young Manuel Quezon, who explicitly chose him thanks to his encyclopedic knowledge, he did not only make some controversial comments about neighboring Asian countries. He also traveled on the just recently inaugurated Tran-Siberian train, from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg, and even met a very prominent political leader in Moscow. Having read the novels of Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, he came to realize that the political and social situation was extremely unstable and rightly predicted the Russian revolution a few years before it started. The title of the 1908 book is Hacia La Tierra del Zar (Toward the Land of the Czar) and deserves to be translated into English or Filipino. Kalaw was not the typical bourgeois trying to show off about a trip that very few Filipinos could afford to make: he was an engaged intellectual who observed the reality of other nations to bring lessons to the Filipino people. By observing and analyzing what other countries were experiencing, he wanted to bring some ideas to improve the material life of the Filipino people and eventually become free of United States control.

During 1926 and 1927, he wrote a collection of articles in the most important newspaper of the period, La Vanguardia. Only after the insistence of his wife, the leading feminist Pura Villanueva Kalaw, did he compile the articles and publish them in 1930. There he included one of those texts that Filipinos should remember forever. Let me quote from it at length, in the wonderful translation by Nick Joaquin:

What should you do to contribute to the liberty and felicity of our land?

Find a piece of land, if you dont have any, that you can cultivate and make productive.

Practice a profession, craft or manual job, where you can demonstrate the ability and artistic genius of our race.

Cultivate your intelligence, your ideals, your sentiments, in such a way that they give glory to the good name of our nation.

The title of this article is What Should You Do?

In another one, titled Intolerance, he wrote:

You can have the pretension that your ideas are excellent and its possible they are; what you cannot do is punish others because they have contrary ideas, even if you are convinced that those ideas are bad. One thing inherent in a free government is that there are men involved in the truth but those who believe they have reason on their side cannot be the judges of the unreasonable.

In another one, titled Obey and Hope, he wrote:

One must obey authority, but one must not enshrine despotism, legalize usurpation or perpetuate slavery.

One must hope for welfare and happiness, but through the means of honest work, virtue and perseverance.

To fold ones arms and attribute to government or Divinity all the good or all the bad, is to sanctify indolence, reward loafing, mistake the nature of government, offend the God we adore and declare the futility of individual effort towards improvement.

This is, so far, the more solid criticism of the bahala na attitude I have ever read.

Unlike so many jewels of Philippine literature in Spanish, this book is available in translation. And, if I am not mistaken, the publisher, Anvil, still has some copies. For reasons unknown to me, the translation took out some of the last articles but, anyway, Spiritual Register is one of those rare books whose articles seemed to have been written yesterday despite the fact they are 90 years old already.

I will finish with another wonderful quote:Combat vice, ignorance, indolence, fanaticism and immorality.

Support every civic reform to improve our citizenry.

Choose good candidates for the government and work for their triumph against the bad, the immoral and the inept.

Think as a Filipino.

Feel yourself a Filipino.

Be proud of being Filipino.

Destroy the myth of racial inferiority with meritorious acts.

Next semester I will be happy to teach again Philippine Literature in Spanish at the University of Santo Tomas. Needless to say, this book will be mandatory reading.

Go here to see the original:

The Spiritual Register of TM Kalaw The Manila Times - The Manila Times