I was halfway through a bottle of cheap whiskey when I first picked up The Tree of Knowledge. Or maybe I was sober. Who knows?
The point is, this book—this old, grumpy Spanish novel—grabbed me by the throat. It wasn’t about grand adventures or love stories.
It was about life, the kind that grinds you down until you either laugh or start punching walls.
Pío Baroja, the guy behind it, was a Spanish writer with a sharp tongue and a bleaker worldview than a hungover philosopher.
The book follows Andrés Hurtado, a medical student who’s smarter than the people around him, but that’s not saying much.
He stumbles through life, questioning everything—his education, society, love, and even existence itself.
In the end, well, let’s just say life doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for him.
But here’s the thing: buried inside this gloomy novel are truths so raw, so brutally honest, that you can’t ignore them.
Here are seven of them.
1. Intelligence Won’t Save You
Andrés is bright, sure. He reads, he thinks, he questions. He watches the world the way a man watches a building burn—curious, horrified, unable to look away.
But does it help?
Not really. Intelligence in a stupid world is like knowing the rules of chess while playing against a pigeon.
You can plan, strategize, think ten moves ahead, but the pigeon doesn’t care.
It will knock over the pieces, flap its wings, make a mess, and strut around like it won.
Andrés sees this.
He sees the doctors fumbling through medicine like blind men searching for a light switch.
He sees the professors, stiff and self-important, recycling the same tired ideas, mistaking memory for wisdom.
He sees people living on autopilot, never questioning why they do what they do. And for all his intelligence, he can’t stop it.
If anything, being smart only makes it worse. He doesn’t just suffer—he understands why he suffers.
He sees the cracks in everything: in people, in institutions, in himself.
The fool walks through life content, unaware of the absurdity of it all.
The smart man? He sees the joke but doesn’t know how to laugh.
2. The Education System Is a Joke
Baroja rips the Spanish education system apart, but let’s be real—it could be anywhere.
Universities pump out mindless parrots, professors teach because they couldn’t hack it in the real world, and students memorize garbage they’ll never use.
Andrés sees through it, but he’s stuck in it. School doesn’t teach you how to think, just how to obey.
3. Society Hates People Who Question It
Try questioning tradition, morality, or the system. Go ahead. Ask why things are the way they are.
Ask why people follow rules that make no sense. See what happens.
Andrés does, and life kicks him in the teeth for it. His family looks at him like he’s got a screw loose.
His professors hate his guts—nobody likes a student who thinks too much.
People want nodding heads, not questions. Even love, that last desperate lifeline, doesn’t save him.
Lulú, the woman who should have been his escape hatch, slips right through his fingers.
Society doesn’t like people who think. It runs on routine, on blind trust, on the comfortable illusion that everything makes sense.
Start poking at it, start asking why, and the whole thing turns on you.
People don’t want the truth. They want comfort. And if you’re the guy pointing out the cracks in the walls, they’ll throw you out before they have to admit the house is falling apart.
4. Love Is a Riddle With No Answer
Andrés falls for Lulú, a woman as lost as he is. Does it work out?
Do we get a happy ending? Of course not.
Baroja isn’t writing fairy tales. Love, in this book, is like a cigarette: burns bright, then fades, leaving only ash.
Some people find peace in relationships, but others, like Andrés, just find more questions and pain.
5. Science Won’t Save You Either
Andrés goes into medicine, thinking maybe science will have the answers.
Cold, hard facts. No superstition, no blind faith, just truth carved into bone and muscle, written in blood and logic.
But truth is slippery.
The more he studies, the more pointless it all feels.
He learns how the heart pumps, how the lungs breathe, how the brain fires off tiny electric sparks like a busted circuit board.
He memorizes the symptoms, the treatments, the Latin names for diseases that chew people up from the inside.
But none of it tells him why people suffer, why they fight so hard to stay alive when life itself feels like a slow disease.
He watches doctors stumble through diagnoses, guessing their way through the human body like lost men in a maze.
One day, a man walks into the clinic and lives.
The next day, another man walks in with the same problem and dies.
Why? Nobody knows. They call it luck.
They call it chance.
Science dresses itself up in white coats and Latin words, but half the time, it’s just rolling the dice with a steady hand.
Medicine can patch up the body, but it can’t fix the bigger sickness—life itself.
And that’s the one that gets everybody in the end.
6. The World Is Run by Idiots
Politicians, professors, businessmen—most of them are bumbling fools.
Baroja knew it, and Andrés sees it. The competent ones?
They either quit or get swallowed by the system.
Look around today, and tell me it’s not the same.
The world isn’t ruled by the best, just by the loudest.
7. There’s No Meaning—So Make Your Own
If there’s one thing this book screams, it’s this: don’t expect life to hand you meaning.
School, tradition—they all sell you prepackaged purpose, but none of it holds up.
Andrés searches, but the truth is, meaning is DIY.
Build it yourself or rot in the emptiness.
Summary Table
| Existential Truth | What It Means |
|---|---|
| Intelligence Won’t Save You | Being smart just makes you more aware of the mess |
| The Education System Is a Joke | School teaches obedience, not thinking |
| Society Hates Thinkers | If you ask too many questions, you get cast out |
| Love Is a Riddle With No Answer | Romance won’t fix your existential crisis |
| Science Won’t Save You Either | Knowing how bodies work doesn’t make life less meaningless |
| The World Is Run by Idiots | The incompetent rise while the wise watch |
| There’s No Meaning—So Make Your Own | Purpose isn’t found, it’s built |
Conclusion
So what do we do with all this?
Crawl into bed and cry?
Get drunk and scream at the moon?
Maybe.
But Baroja isn’t just preaching doom and gloom—he’s handing us a blueprint.
If life has no meaning, if love and education and intelligence don’t save us, then screw it. Do what you want.
Make your own rules. Laugh at the absurdity of it all.
That’s the real lesson of The Tree of Knowledge: If nothing matters, everything is possible. And maybe that’s not so bad after all.
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