A dream shattered

The death of Nick Joaquin led me to reread his Introduction to the collection of speeches of Senator Claro Recto intended for delivery in Madrid. Recto’s death had prevented him from ever delivering those speeches. They were later published (with English translations by Joaquin) by Senator Lorenzo Tañada and his group (the Recto Memorial Foundation).

In that Introduction Nick Joaquin calls attention to a seeming paradox: Recto was a militant nationalist; yet he was also an ardent advocate of the preservation and cultivation of the cultural heritage left by Spain in the Philippines. Recto was an ardent lover of Spain and Spanish culture, and of the Spanish language which he spoke and wrote with perfection. This militant nationalist was also the kind that a more ignorant generation would later accuse of having a "colonial mentality".

Yet it was precisely because he was a nationalist that Recto wished to preserve our culture as it had been shaped by our history.

What a vast difference there was (observes Nick) between the wide mental horizons of Recto and his generation and the narrow impoverished culture of later generations of Filipinos. Recto’s ge-neration was cosmopolitan in its thinking. Its mental horizons were open to the culture of Athens, Rome, Madrid, Paris and London. In the 1920s (observes Nick Joaquin) a new generation of Filipino youth had arisen, whose mental horizons had narrowed to include only New York, Washington and Hollywood.

Nick Joaquin’s Introduction does not mention other languages, but we might add that in Recto’s time (like Rizal’s) the educated Filipino spoke Latin, Spanish, French and English besides his native Tagalog or other Philippine language. In addition, that generation was exposed to Greek literature.

Rizal, while in exile in Dapitan, opened a school where he taught Spanish and English to Visayan-speaking boys. He had earlier won the medal in Greek literature in Madrid and had also studied Arabic.

Perhaps it was just as well that Rizal did not live to see the 20th century. He would have suffered to see the shattering of his dreams for the Filipino youth and for the Filipino nation. He had dreamed of a nation the equal in culture with other nations of the world. Instead he would have been disappointed to see a nation culturally isolated and impoverished and in many respects morally decadent.