It could be that perhaps we do not like too much this Christmas with its illuminated streets, consumerist propaganda, over-played carols, unenthusiastic reunions, obligatory gifts…, or that we even dislike it. Yet, if we could free it from commercial exploitation, our deceitful ambitions, even from our boring liturgies, empty words and outdated dogmas, if we […]
One hand on the beauty of the world. The other one on the suffering of the people. Both feet jumping from the task to the party. And the heart on fire. (Matxalen Ojanguren Alonso) In the weakness of the human our deepest truth is revealed, because the heartbeat of the world is its frailty. (Pepa […]
For the first time in the history of the Earth, written in fire, water and life, we Homo sapiens, a very recent species, have crossed the line of 8 billion inhabitants. I do not regard this as a glorious milestone, but rather as a worrying warning sign. We have nothing to celebrate, but much to […]
I read in EL PAÍS: “Men are going to have trouble being fertile in barely a decade, if they continue at this rate: the number of spermatozoa per ejaculation has not stopped falling for almost a century. Their concentration has also fallen to less than half of what it was 50 years ago, approaching the […]
We do not like to talk about death, in spite of its being part of our daily life. We do not like to talk about death, but –or, better yet, because- death hurts. And it is somebody else’s death the one that hurts most, the dejected solitude and the sadness of the void it left […]
Don’t ask how many were killed, don’t ask how many were injured. “Hundreds, they say. A hundred up, a hundred down, who cares? Don’t ask how they died. Don’t ask if those deaths were avoidable. Don’t ask about responsibility for this crime against young Africans without rights and without bread. Don’t ask. The dead are […]
Parabole in memory of all those whose apparent presence we lost An Autumn afternoon I was in a park, contemplating a pretty and very small leaf shaped as a heart. It was reddish and it dangled from a branch, as if it were about to fall. I spent a long time with it and asked […]
The horrific destruction spreading across the Earth moves me to look at the profound mystery of creativity that inhabits it. We are the sons and daughters of creativity, and responsible for it. I am a creature of the air I breathe, of the blood that courses through my body, of the substances that nourish me, […]
In the hot afternoons of the first week of last August, in the shade of a lime tree in Champigny-sur-Veude, a peaceful French village surrounded by wide sunflower and corn fields, I read with both enthusiasm and uneasiness Béatrice Lebel-Goascoz’s doctoral dissertation Boquen entre utopie et révolution1965-1976 (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). It is a […]
Galo Martínez de la Pera continues his solitary reflection on community, the building of Basque citizenship and culture, feminism, the future of humanity and humanism. He does so with density and brilliance. He has just published Emearen bidea supergizakiaren aroan (“The Female Path in the Age of the Superman”) (Alberdania 2022), written in an excellent […]