Literature
Don Colacho’s Epitaphs
Nicolás Gómez Dávila’s aphorisms are a reactionary’s sharpest weapon.
by CHRIS R . MORGAN
N
icolás Gómez Dávila should be one of the
most divisive writers in the contempo-
rary world of letters and political thought.
He should, on the one hand, have a legion
of readers who hang on his every word like freshly
hooked fish. On the other hand, he should have an
equal, perhaps slightly larger force of readers—tak-
ing into account those who don’t actually read what
they’re detracting—who see his writing as little more
than a verbal ipecac. But two decades after his death,
no such divisions have been wrought. Gómez Dávi-
la’s literary oblivion is arguably the least attractive,
if most poetic, kind: earned not by conspiracy or
changing fashions but by his own hand.
“Democracy has terror for its means and totalitari-
anism for its end,” Gómez Dávila once wrote. In that
single stroke an argument is initiated and ended. It
is just one of thousands of sentences Gómez Dávila
composed in his nearly 81-year life, but which very
few have read. They covered every deep subject imag-
inable in the same terse, confident, clever, and intran-
sigent manner, at only slightly varying lengths. These
aphorisms, called escolios (“scholia” or “glosses”) by
their author, stand on their own, ever at attention like
a verbal infantry with bayonets armed, ready to re-
turn fire rather than to facilitate civil dialogue. In his
lifetime Gómez Dávila would publish these passages
only reluctantly, often at the insistence of others, and
usually on his own publicity-averse terms.
On the surface, these aphorisms seem like throw-
aways. Yet Gómez Dávila’s mind was not wired for
frivolity. In spite of their brevity, each escolio has a
sculpted composition, fashioned to conform to an
overriding vision that is as rigid in its consistency as it
was free from ideological conventions.
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014
Matching the brevity of this work is the scarcity of
biographical information about its author, at least in
English. We know that Gómez Dávila was born in
1913 in Cajicá, Colombia, 25 miles outside Bogotá.
His father was a wealthy industrialist who moved his
family to France while Gómez Dávila was still young.
He was educated by Benedictines before being bed-
ridden for two years by pneumonia. He returned to
Colombia in his early 20s and rarely left again. He
married and had three children. Despite his stunted
formal education, he was able to speak and/or read
in nearly all the major European languages, and he
would later take part in founding Universidad de los
Andes.
He did not need to work; whatever obligations he
had in managing his father’s carpet-manufacturing
business were minimal. Though considered a recluse
today, Gómez Dávila had an active social life among
Colombia’s elite, who nicknamed him Don Colacho.
He was an avid horseman, splitting his time between
his library and a jockey club until an injury largely re-
stricted him to the former. Gómez Dávila, like Scho-
penhauer, was free from the obligations of getting on
in life and so resolved to occupy himself with thinking
about it ceaselessly. For all intents and purposes his li-
brary, filled with nearly 30,000 books, was his “office.”
His actual “job” is difficult to pin down. Few would
call him a philosopher or scholar, Gómez Dávila hav-
ing the inclinations and abilities of both while lacking
the credentials. “Thinker” seems too precious for his
severe sensibilities and “curmudgeon” too coarse. In
ambiguous cases like these, it’s just easier to follow the
Chris R. Morgan lives in New Jersey and was editor of a
cultural ‘zine called Biopsy.
T H E A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VA T I V E 37
 Literature
preferences of the jobholder: “The reactionary today
is merely a traveler who suffers shipwreck with dig-
nity.” That is what Gómez Dávila was.
“The reactionary does not become a conservative
except in ages which maintain something worthy of
being conserved.” Reaction is a very antipolitical line
of political thought, formed less by systematic pro-
grams, rationales, or coalitions than by whatever it
is its most vocal adherents deem correct. “In the im-
mense sphere of living things,” wrote 19th-century
Savoyard thinker Joseph de Maistre, “the obvious rule
is violence, a kind of inevitable frenzy which arms all
things in mutua funera.”
Conservatism’s appeal has always rested in its pro-
fessed unwillingness to compromise in pursuit of its
causes. A reactionary distinguishes himself or herself
from the movement conservative by being committed
and uncompromising to a degree that discomforts the
latter. The conservative embraces democracy to the
extent that the conservative can direct it in reaching
his or her goals. The reactionary merely resigns him
or herself to its existence. “I am an aristocrat,” said
early 19th-century Virginia congressman John Ran-
dolph of Roanoke, “I love liberty, I hate equality.”
If conservatives are characterized by nostalgia,
reactionaries are characterized by decadence. Con-
servatives build networks and speak in sound bites;
38 T H E A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VA T I V E
Nicolás Gómez Dávila / Wikimedia Commons
reactionaries build mausoleums and speak in epi-
taphs. Reactionaries are aesthetic rather than practical
thinkers. They play alongside, if not across, the border
of tragedy and fatalism. Civil debate is meaningless to
the side that has already lost.
“If the reactionary concedes the fruitlessness of his
principles and the uselessness of his censures,” Gómez
Dávila wrote in his essay “The Authentic Reaction-
ary,” “it is not because the spectacle of human confu-
sion suffices for him. The reactionary does not refrain
from taking action because the risk frightens him, but
rather because he judges that the forces of society are
at the moment rushing headlong toward a goal that
he disdains.”
Gómez Dávila’s reactionary gaze was a vast one
applicable to any subject previously worthy of intel-
lectual dissection: from politics to economics to the
arts to manners, and certainly religion. Gómez Dávila
found corruption not only in democracy but in capi-
talism (“The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto
are on the wane; the world’s future lies in the power of
Coca-Cola and pornography”); in the rise of indus-
try and technology (“God invented tools, the devil
machines”); in individual liberty (“Liberalism pro-
claims the right of the individual to degrade oneself,
provided one’s degradation does not impede the deg-
radation of one’s neighbor”); and in blind patriotism
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014
 (“That patriotism which is not a carnal adhesion to
specific landscapes, is rhetoric designed by semi-edu-
cated men to spur the illiterate on towards the slaugh-
terhouse”). This is to name but a few cultural felonies
that protrude from our mundane striving for better-
ment. As Gómez assesses: “The cultural standard of an
intelligent people sinks as its standard of living rises.”
Against the “vulgarity” of mechanization, of popu-
lar sovereignty, and of bourgeois striving stand the
“virtues” of aesthetic purity, of hierarchy, and of aris-
tocratic chivalry. Notions of God, tradition, and dis-
cipline are nothing new to Americans—many hold
them dear—yet they spoil into abstraction when not
fueling our prized mobility. “With the disappearance
of the upper class, there is nowhere to take refuge
from the smugness of the middle class and the rude-
ness of the lower class.”
Yet virtues exist as ends in themselves, as prereq-
uisites for character rather than as shortcuts to secu-
rity. The lesson’s simplicity could be insulting when
drained either of Gómez Dávila’s polished austerity—
“Discipline is not so much a social necessity as an aes-
thetic obligation”—or his idiosyncratically inclusive
grandness: “The true aristocrat is the man who has
an interior life. Whatever his origin, his rank, or his
fortune.”
Though severe and fatalistic, Gómez Dávila’s writ-
ing never reached Maistre’s blank misanthropy. And
for all of its fulminating against progress, Gómez
Dávila’s aristocratic ideal was every bit as utopian,
countercultural, and impractical as that of any ten-
ured radical or commune dweller. In his later life, Gó-
mez Dávila would be offered political appointments
on more than one occasion, first in 1958 as an adviser
to President Alberto Lleras Camargo and again in
1974 as ambassador to the United Kingdom. To his
credit, he turned down both.
His refusal to act in workaday politics carried over
into his reluctance to publish any of his writing. With
coaxing from family and friends he published private,
limited editions of his aphorisms in 1954, simply ti-
tled Notas, and a collection of longer pieces, Textos,
in 1959. Only in 1977 did he publish the more ex-
travagantly christened collection Escolios a un Texto
Implícito (Scholia on the Margin of an Implicit Text),
whose title set the pattern for subsequent publications
in 1986 and 1992.The small print runs and dry pack-
aging ensured that very few people would take inter-
est in discovering the salacious contents contained
therein.
Near the end of his days, however, Gómez Dávila
started to attract attention outside of his immediate
circle, even outside his own country—predominantly
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014
in Germany, where conservative writers like Botho
Strauss, Martin Mosebach, and their elder statesman
Ernst Jünger took interest in his works. This soon gave
way to translations and mass publication in Germany,
France, and Italy. His presence in his native Colombia
remains faint, though his books have been brought
back into print with the support of his daughter, and
Gabriel García Márquez is rumored to have said that
he would gladly think like Gómez Dávila, were he not
already a communist.
Still fainter than his presence in Latin America is
his presence in North America. “The Authentic Reac-
tionary” appeared in Modern Age in 2010, but no of-
ficial English translation of Gómez Dávila’s aphorisms
has ever been published. Yet they exist in English
nonetheless: the work of this man who never owned
a television has found its way onto the Internet, with
private translations passed around like a virtual
samizdat. The most comprehensive collection exists
thanks to someone going by the username “Stephen,”
who operates a blog called Don Colacho’s Aphorisms,
which has painstakingly organized and posted Eng-
lish translations of nearly 3,000 aphorisms since 2010,
with an index by subject matter and links to other
sources and translations.
A search on Twitter finds six accounts with Gómez
Dávila’s name and image attached to them. Of those,
three are in English, and one—handled @DColacho
and co-managed by First Things deputy editor Mat-
thew Schmitz—updated regularly until March of this
year, retains over 700 followers. From these sources,
Gómez Dávila’s words are spread ever further and
faster, freshly uncovered by new followers, many of
them young: an ideological mix of conservative, Cath-
olic, monarchist, anarchist, traditionalist, aesthete,
and every conceivable combination thereof.
With so fervent, independent, and seemingly spon-
taneous a following, is a formal book or “legitimate”
translation even called for? I think it is a possibility
worth exploring at least. Though Gómez Dávila lacks
the playful contradictions that teem in the aphorisms
of Friedrich Nietzsche and the corroding bile of Am-
brose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary, he is no less the indi-
vidual mind than they are. His style trades comfort-
ably in cold elegance and brutal condemnation, apart
or in lethal combination.
Gómez Dávila was a scourge of his age. He was, in
the end, more of a literary and philosophical diagnos-
tician than a prophet. There isn’t much in the way of
soothsaying affirmation in Don Colacho—in fact
there is none—but there is the balm of honest as-
sessment, which stings and cools with any applica-
tion, but never numbs.
T H E A M E R I C A N C O N S E R VA T I V E 39
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