THE MISFORTUNE OF THE LOSS OF FAITH** CÉSAR VALLEJO AND THE PAIN OF EXISTENCE

Abstract

The human being is the only creature or «metaphysical animal» that has the metaphysical necessity, i.e., the need to explain the world in which they live and to have rules of life to live in harmony with their peers, develop beliefs and live accordingly.

This metaphysical need is met through faith, which is the basic element of thought. It starts with the consciousness itself and once begun, develops a tendency to conservation.

Now, we need to have faith to channel our lives. It may refer to a deity or some ideal; for without it as unbelievers, we sink into deeper nihilism, which inevitably will lead to the loss of the desire to continue living.

César Vallejo, authentic poet and «daring» knew of this need and his word was an expression of a deep thought that came to the most extreme limits of human words. At his early stages, as a devoted Jewish-Christian he questioned God for so much misery, inequality and suffering, which «this poor thoughtful mud» had to endure. Then moving away from this divinity, he put his heart into the new faith of Marxist or communist cause, in order to build a new world where the true creator God was the proletariat, and his revolution was the fundamental act of creation of God.

However, after his experience in the Spanish Civil War, this new faith has disappointed him completely. He is truly alone, which is the greatest desolation of contemporary nihilism. He abandoned the transcendent God and gave himself to the God of the reason: the laws, the state and the party ...; and this latter has failed him. There is no turning back, then, on trying; he has burned all his bridges. He has played a lifetime; he has lost faith ...!; and without it, human beings cannot live especially if they are highly sensitive and intelligent as all true poets are, and as this Peruvian poet was.