ALBERTO BARCIELA
WANDERING OF INFINITIES
May 2, 2024
The world is going through its circumstances, not a few of them discouraging. Among them, everyone seems to be doing their own thing -except me, as the countryman would say, I’m doing my own thing-. Negotiating -negotiating, agreeing- basic consensus on essential issues: health, peace, democracy, freedom, respect, education, welfare… evoke literary, Calderonian dreams, more typical of deluded segismundos, of disturbed quixotes, than realistic aspirations of simple citizens, willing to live according to the demands of a certain common sense, subject to some minimum rules of coexistence and accepting a certain abandonment of sterile personal, ideological and even geographic selfishness.
Like Paul Auster, who passed away these days, I believe that in a generic way, we have the impression that “we will always be happy in the place where we are not”, or obtaining what we do not possess and long for, or escaping in the solitude of the entangled screens, or living other people’s lives scripted by an audiovisual platform or transferred by a random broker. The top of the paradigm may be that unbridled tourism, which more than experience seems to run after records that involve visitors crowded in specific spaces, at specific times and willing to pay astronomical figures to live a moment of apparent happiness at prices of definitive, frustrating experiences.
Something is wrong, not only in the travel industry, but in all areas: there are millions of unemployed but labor is in demand; we have the best educated generations but they have to emigrate; we cannot live in the cities -prices, lack of housing, agglomeration- but the wonderful countryside remains empty; we have the best health system but it is not able to support the ordered demand; we live a demographic crisis but we are not able to welcome immigrants with criteria; we enjoy all the climatic alerts but we continue destroying the blue planet; we feel alone, threatened, in the global … the elderly and the young say they are helpless, women are excluded… not to mention conflict zones, wars, famines, mafia systems disguised as liberal democracies, digital insecurity ….
And, in spite of everything, we know that there must be a moment of hatching -we hope it is not nuclear-, of revolution, of change. A transition -hopefully as beautiful as the one told to us by the late Victoria Prego, an excellent person and the best teacher of journalists- is more than necessary and essential, but beyond politics it must come from the citizenship, from the generous sharing of the truths that grip us and that need to find an alternative beyond the ideological extremism.
Auster said that “life is simultaneously tragic and comic, at once absurd and profoundly meaningful.” We must experience happiness here where we are, in this now, for there is no other, and as a wise Galician, Fray Benito Jerónimo Feijoo, said, “only in one way can one get it right; to err, of infinities.” We must dare to change, without rancor, and find the alternative to the disaster to which we are condemning ourselves.
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Alberto Barciela, Spanish journalist, is vice-president of EditoRed.
This article was originally published in Prensa Ibérica.
