Don Ramón's Aesthetic Meditations

Be like the nightingale,

which never looks at earth 

from the green bough whereon it sings.

I read La lámpara maravillosa years ago and found its brand of mysticism alluring.  Apparently the UM library only has the Robert Lima English translation.  From what I can see it captures some of this allure from the original.  His esthetic begins to fuse itself to natural imagery: "The subtlest intertwining of words is like the motion of caterpillars undulating beneath a ray of sunlight" (6).  Yet the meditative voice of the author also works like an echo chamber.  At the beginning of "The Ring of Gyges":

When I was a boy the glory of literature and the glory of adventure tempted me equally.  It was a time full of dark voices, replete with a vast murmur, ardent and mystical, to which my being responded by becoming sonorous like a conch-shell (9).

Don Ramón begins from the "larval" stages of his formation, blurring voices with the written word his obscure "Aesthetic Discipline".  To me, it is interesting that many of these Generation of 98 writers and thinkers use similar tropes to underscore their hopes for a regeneración of nation.  Unamuno uses geological metaphors to discuss his concept of intrahistoria.  For Unamuno, it is necessary to imagine the underground caverns and chambers of islands in order to understand the unveiled status of something like regeneración.  Of course, Valle-Inclán limits his thinking to the esthetic.  His nervous system is infused with these "dark voices".  This murmuring remains negative and indeterminate, only experienced through the work of an echo.