This work begins from the fundamental question of how Nicolas Gomez Davila’s Notas (1954) elaborates the relationship between writing and philosophy. This question interrogates both the basic nature of the text and the thought that is exercised in it. My hypothesis is that Gomez Davila regards philosophy as simultaneously a way of life and a spiritual activity, both of which are developed through writing. Furthermore, this reading of Notas is based on the principle that the work itself offers the key concepts for its interpretation. In his Notas we encounter Gomez Davila living a life devoted to lucidity, a life committed to thought. Such a life is philosophy in its most original version, a life that needs to think, and in order to think needs writing. Writing is therefore the possibility of both life and philosophy, and much more than simply a matter of literary, philosophical or rhetorical technique, as these are understood by modernity. The first chapter outlines and justifies this interpretation of Notas based on Notas, with the first section developing its main arguments. The second section develops one of them: the relationship between the work and its time. The second chapter elaborates Gomez Davila’s idea of a life devoted to the lucidity of reason through the practice of writing. This section pays close attention to the first pages of Notas, which seem to function as a foreword and present the book as a series of ideas written by a humanist. The third chapter builds on the previous two, arguing that Gomez Davila faced modernity as an observer of ideas, a writing-thinking observer who performed his task through reading. This chapter carefully reads Gomez Davila’s way of reading, paying close attention to how he treats his authors. Gomez Davila consummates these relations in writing, in acts of appropriation, citation and re-writing. Such acts show a pattern, and can be arranged through the spectrum of his spiritual affinities and hostilities. At the end of the chapter I explore three examples of this hostility; the warm hostility that unites Gomez Davila and Nietzsche; the curious, almost obsessive hostility that repeatedly leads him back to Marx; and the disconcerting hostility of his reading of Sade in which he confronted what was most alien to him. The fourth chapter is a reflection on the relationship between writing and philosophy as a way of life. This classical notion of philosophy coexists in Gomez Davila with the more humanist idea of philosophy as an activity of the spirit. Both notions build a living objection to the modern approach to philosophy as a discipline or a profession. Finally this work concludes with an onomastic index of Notas and two tables: one of explicit quotations and another that locates foreign expressions in the text.