The Notebook. José Saramago
but for some mysterious reason I thought that a writer, especially one from that part of the world, should not dress in that way. My mistake. Carlos Fuentes managed to make the greatest critical demands and the greatest ethical rigor—both of which he has—compatible with a well-chosen tie. Believe me, that’s no small thing.
October 16: Federico Mayor Zaragoza
The Frankfurt Book Fair begins: gathered there all together, the great entrepreneurs of the book world announce hard times for the object from which we have long derived a living and to which we still owe so much. Apparently all the big publishing houses are there, but there are countless small publishers who cannot travel, who cannot afford the stands that others can, and who are nevertheless fighting against the fulfillment of that fatal prediction: the span of ten years that will see paper books come to an end and digital ones take over. What will the future be like? I don’t know. Although we have not yet reached that day, a day that will go hard for the inhabitants of the Gutenberg galaxy, I offer here a brief tribute to small publishers, for example Spain’s Ânfora, which is about to publish a book by my friend Federico Mayor Zaragoza, the man who wanted Unesco to be something more than just an acronym or an elite place—in other words, a real forum for solving problems, using culture and education as the basic, if not the only, ingredients. I wrote the prologue to Mayor Zaragoza’s book En pie de paz [At the Feet of Peace], which was more a vow than a title, and I have brought it to this blog today as a modest offering, hoping that it might add to the number of those who struggle to improve the lives of others—the lives of the anonymous people who are the substance of the planet.
EN PIE DE PAZ
Federico Mayor Zaragoza translates the pains of his conscience into poems. Of course, he is not the only poet to do this, but the difference—to my mind a fundamental one—lies in the fact that they, these poems, almost without exception, are an appeal to the conscience of the world, delivered this time without the illusions of his earlier almost systemic optimism. Speaking to the conscience of the world could easily be taken as yet another vague gesture to add to those that have lately been infecting the ideological discourse and so-called thinking of certain sectors of the left. That is not so. Federico Mayor Zaragoza knows humanity and the world better than most; he is not a fickle tourist of ideas, one of those who devote their attention to discovering which way the wind is blowing and then consistently setting their course wherever they consider most convenient. When I say that in his poems Federico Mayor Zaragoza appeals to the conscience of the world, I mean that he is addressing himself to people, to each and every one of them, people who wander about, confused, disoriented, stunned, amid intentionally contradictory messages, trying not to inhale the atmosphere of organized lies that has come to compete with simple oxygen and simple nitrogen.
Some would say that Federico Mayor Zaragoza’s poetry has been feeding from the inexhaustible store of good intentions. Personally, I disagree. Federico Mayor feeds—poetically and vitally—from another store, the one that holds the treasure of his inexhaustible and extraordinary kindness. His poems, more sophisticated than their formal simplicity admits, are the expressions of an exemplary personality, a man who has not cut himself off from the living masses, who belongs to them through feeling and reason, two human attributes that have reached a higher level in Federico. We owe this man, this poet, this citizen much more than we can imagine.
October 17: God as a Problem
On the list of all the most unlikely things in the world, the possibility of Cardinal Rouco Varela reading this blog would be close to the top. Be that as it may, since the Catholic Church continues to maintain that miracles do happen, I’ll put my trust in that assertion and hope that one day the eyes of the illustrious, erudite, and pleasant empurpled one might light upon the lines that follow. There are many more pressing problems than secularism, which his eminence considers responsible for Nazism and communism, and it is precisely about one of these problems that I speak here. So read, Senhor Cardinal, read. Get some spiritual exercise.
GOD AS A PROBLEM
I have no doubt that this discourse, beginning with its very title, will achieve the prodigious wonder of bringing into agreement, at least for this once, the two irreconcilable enemy brothers called Islam and Christianity, particularly as regards the universal (that is, catholic) pinnacle to which the first aspires and which the second still mistakenly believes itself to occupy. In the most benign of possible reactions, the well-meaning will cry that it is an inexcusable provocation, an unforgivable offence to the religious feelings of believers on both sides, and in the worst (assuming there is anything worse than this) I will be accused of irreverence, sacrilege, blasphemy, profanation, disrespect, and whatever other offences of the like order they might be able to discover, and thus, who knows, deserving of a punishment that would be a badge of dishonor for the rest of my life. If I belonged to the Christian club myself, Vatican Catholicism would have to interrupt the Cecil B. de Mille–style spectacles it currently indulges in to take the trouble to excommunicate me; however, once they had fulfilled this disciplinary obligation they would find themselves losing their nerve. They already lack the strength for bolder deeds, now that the tears wept by their victims have dampened—forever, we hope—the firewood that made up the technological arsenal of the first Inquisition. As for Islam, in its modern fundamentalist and violent variety (as violent and fundamentalist as Catholicism was in its imperial version), the watchword par excellence, insanely proclaimed every day, is Death to the infidels. Or, in a free translation, If you don’t believe in Allah you are a filthy cockroach, which, even though it, too, is a creature born from the divine fiat, any Muslim who cultivates expeditious methods has the sacred right and duty to crush under the slipper with which he will enter Muhammad’s paradise to be received into the voluptuous bosoms of the houris. Allow me therefore to say now that God, who has always been a problem, is now the problem.
Like any other person who is not indifferent to the pitiful situation of the world in which he lives, I have read some of what has been written by others about the political, economic, social, psychological, strategic and even moral motives in which aggressive Islamic movements have taken root, movements that have cast the so-called Western world (and not only here) into a state of disorientation, fear, even the most extreme terror. Relatively low-powered bombs (we should remember that they have almost always been carried to the site of attacks in rucksacks), just a few here and there, have been enough to shake and begin to crack the foundations of our so very luminous civilization, bringing nearer the grand collapse of the ultimately precarious structures of collective security that have been set up and maintained at such labor and cost. Our feet, which we thought were shod in the strongest steel, have turned out to be feet of clay.
You might say it is the clash of civilizations. Perhaps, but that is not how it seems to me. The more than six thousand million inhabitants of this planet, all of them, live in what we might accurately call a global oil civilization: even those who are deprived of the precious “black gold” are not outside its domination. This oil civilization creates and satisfies (unequally, as we know) multiple needs that bring to the same well the Greeks and Trojans of classical renown, along with Arabs and non-Arabs, Christians and Muslims, not to mention those who, being neither one thing nor another, still, wherever they may be, have a car to drive, a digger to set to work, a cigarette lighter to light. Clearly this does not mean that beneath this civilization that is common to all we should not be able to discern the traces (or more than mere traces in some instances) of ancient cultures and civilizations now engaged in the technological processes of westernization as though on a forced march—a westernization that has managed to penetrate the substantial core of these cultures’ personal and collective mentalities only with great difficulty. And for some reason they say that the habit doesn’t make the monk . . .
An alliance of civilizations, were it to be realized, could represent an important step toward the reduction of global tensions, a step from which we seem to be ever further away, but it would be inadequate, if not totally impracticable,