Life & Wisdom Quote by Jose Bergamin

Bergamin’s line lands like a wry menu joke, then tightens into a theory of culture. French literature, in his framing, is a la carte: a tradition of sharply individualized appetites, where the reader (and the writer) can pick a course, a style, a stance. Think of the French canon’s comfort with dissent as a literary posture: aphorism, salon polemic, philosophical novel, decadent experiment. The pleasure is elective, curated, even a little consumerist. You don’t have to buy the whole worldview to enjoy the dish.

Spanish literature, he argues, arrives as a set meal: fewer substitutions, more ritual, heavier portions. Not “worse,” but more binding. The subtext is about authority and inheritance: Spain’s long entanglement with Catholic orthodoxy, empire, and later political fracture makes literature feel like a fate you sit down to, not a tasting you assemble. A set menu implies a host, a house style, a sequence you endure and are changed by. You can complain about the courses, but you’re still eating the same dinner as everyone else.

The intent isn’t to rank nations so much as to sketch two temperaments: French modernity as choice, Spanish modernity as destiny. Coming from Bergamin - a Spanish essayist shaped by the Second Republic, civil war trauma, and exile - the metaphor also reads as self-portrait. For him, Spanish writing isn’t a hobbyist’s buffet; it’s an obligation with history in the broth. The joke works because it flatters France’s freedom while quietly mourning (and defending) Spain’s seriousness.