How quiet must it be? I mean: deciding to be silent when you can still speak, write and be heard in the public agora. What must it be like to have a privileged mind and not want to say anything else? I was ruminating on this when suddenly, for various reasons, it occurred to me.
He is the Valencian intellectual with greater power and depth since . A mind where the serene rivers of the classical humanism of Greece and Rome, the brave utopia of Europeanism and the bleeding wound of a left-wing Valencianism that is slowly disappearing, cross. That mind that has given forty books, Borja Papatwo thousand articles and the herculean translations into Catalan of theOdysseythe Gospels or The Divine Comedyis now 85 years old. Joan Francesc Mira is no longer a name in the weekly column or in the news table. Joan Francesc Mira has a dentist today and the spine that worries him the most is the vertebral column. Normal; the life
He dials the landline of his house and, after the good day, runs into me asking him about this world of neo-populism, attacks on the Valencian, European fractures and networks that multiply the show and swallow culture. When he stops and is silent, the accelerated voice of Mira, the silent sage, sounds on the other side. And when the wise man speaks, he does so to tell me that in order to respond to all this apocalyptic cascade, it would be necessary to assume that things are as bad as I present them, but that he does not believe it, for nothing, like that. And then Mira, who is 85 years old and an anthropologist, who has looked both backwards and sideways, begins to speak.
And he says that when he was little, in the 1940s, he passed the old hospital in Valencia and it looked like Calcutta, with the sick on the floor. That in that Valencia of the fifties, where she grew up in the parish of La Torre, Mrs. Rosa spent many mornings at her house and asked her mother if she could leave her an egg from the chickens. They were times of rice with poverty and a liter of oil in the ration coupon. Then he tells that one day, in Plaça Redona, and this was already in the sixties, a man approached the stalls of old books, stopped in front of a volume with the cover in Valencian, and asked if it was also inside written in Valencian, and he ran away half-scared. And then he says that at that time Europe was a fantasy; pure geographical description. That just to go to France you had to take out your passport, change trains, go through customs and see how your suitcase was handled. And he counts all this to say that he sees no reason to be pessimistic. That we always need to know where we come from in order to value our present well. That it is one thing to have a critical spirit and the other is to abuse presentism and see only the negative side. That you need to work, fight and stop crying. and they all always forget about Paradise. And to keep quiet, when so much has been said, nothing happens.
