1 - In Spirit and Truth

Summary

Meaning

‘Meaning makes a great many thing endurable – perhaps everything’. When we think about the impact of seeing the meaning in something, perhaps after not understanding the experience for some time, we may agree that the sense of calm, of a world opening up, of seeing a way forward in a new direction, rooted now in understanding, really does make difficult, challenging, even devastating experiences bearable. In 1989 Carmen Martín Gaite told the Italian Hispanist Maria Vittoria Calvi that eventually she was able to understand the meaning in everything, that she experienced everything in a very meaningful way. The understanding she arrives at represents an objective appreciation of situations and experiences that may not have been apparent at the time. Four years earlier her twenty-eight-year-old daughter, Marta, had died as the result of a heroin addiction, yet Martín Gaite sets no limits to her understanding. In a recent book exploring Martín Gaite's six final novels with reference to the writer's own testimony, shared during their many years of friendship, Joan Lipman Brown relates that Martín Gaite told her ‘she saw Marta as “una pionera” [a pioneer], since she was one of the first to confront the twin plagues of heroin and AIDS that would claim the lives of so many young Spaniards’. Martín Gaite's perspective endows the experience of Marta's life and death with meaning, opening up a new way of seeing and understanding. It may also provide a sense of a new dimension, which is not surprising when we consider the source of Martín Gaite's view that everything is meaningful.

In the same interview, Martín Gaite described herself to Maria Vittoria Calvi as religious, as having a lot of religious feeling. The qualification she placed on her definition of ‘religious’ brings it closer to what might be described as ‘spirituality’. Martín Gaite is not describing adherence to a creed or following prescribed practices, but a perspective that recognises the presence of a supernatural world in addition to the day-to-day world, and seeks to reunite the two. It involves living in full recognition of the interaction of the day-to-day and spiritual worlds. For Martín Gaite defines her understanding of ‘religion’ as ‘volver a atar’ (from religare), meaning to bind back or bind again, with the idea of reconnecting: