In the darkness, once I get up, I activate my mobile phone and pictures unexpectedly emerge that the subtitles describe as “exciting moment in which a donkey runs from afar to reunite with its owner.” Stupefied, I see the donkey advance in direction of the attention of the digicam, which can be my very own eye, and that’s the reason I additionally see how the donkey is about to rub my nostril. But will it’s doable? Is it acceptable that, at this level and with just one life left, I’ve to enter the brand new day envisioning the footsteps of a donkey?
Who packages these awakenings for us? God in individual? Or is it the whale Moby Dick, with that disturbing whole whiteness that, in keeping with Melville, intensifies the deepest fears of the human situation?
“But how bad the world is!” It is the loud criticism that I hear on a regular basis, an comprehensible criticism if we see, for instance, that there’s not a single nation within the West wherein the ignorant haven’t changed the enlightened. But it’s an previous criticism, which grew to become insistent in direction of the second half of the nineteenth century, when the good achievements of the Age of Enlightenment got here into disaster. Had Western civilization, with its religion in progress, taken an evolutionary flip that had introduced it to the utter whiteness of a lifeless finish? Or was it that the long run now not belonged to the pensive and hyper-aware human being, however to the brute being, in no way reflective, a dying fool?
Just in that half of the nineteenth century, a lucid Flaubert would write that the world was going to grow to be “tremendously stupid and very boring” and that future generations must “learn to move in a society of terrifying rudeness”, the place the brand new determine of the “businessman” would proliferate (the businessman).
A century later, round 1956, in the midst of the “time of silence” in my land, the college school rooms have been managed by a superb variety of huge assholes, visceral enemies of thought and examine. One hardly heard of sophistication hatred, however of hatred of the “first in the class.”
Time has handed and the descendants of that uncultured cockiness are those who at the moment are supporting a world wherein, if it weren’t for the truth that they discovered literary writing ready-made, nobody would have considered inventing it, and much more so since it’s a socially unproductive apply and, on high of that, troublesome to worth from an financial viewpoint.
I believe that it’ll at all times be troublesome for literary writing to be taken away from us, as a result of that is just like the dignity that the Albanian Lea Ypi says in her newest e book is one thing inside that nobody can take away from us. Read Ypi —simply printed Indignity (Anagrama, 2026)—looks as if a author completely related to the “cultural optimism mode.” This identical month, in Paris, he proposed that, on this world ruled by tensions between oppression and freedom, we attempt to reconnect with the struggles of the Enlightenment.
And why not? Or would not reconnecting with the lights of Reason presently, the way in which issues are going, be a extremely subversive act?
https://elpais.com/cultura/2026-03-31/por-un-optimismo-cultural-subversivo.html