Dear reader!
Today this writing-newsletters business feels a little cold, a little distant, I don’t know. Don’t you feel the same, dear reader? Well, let’s pretend there’s none of this distance, this coldness. Let’s imagine we meet on the street and we start talking about some front-page issue. Maybe we agree and that cuts our talk short, maybe we disagree and and that cuts our talk short too. Only after our parting (let’s imagine we’re crossing a street in the opposite direction), do I remember what I really wanted to tell you.
Josep Pla writes about this. Talking about Catalonia, he says (and pardon my translation):“In this country, we have a very curious habit. When we meet, on the street, two people face to face, we don’t have, really, anything to say to each other. But, as soon as we’ve said goodbye and walked seven or eight steps, a bunch of urgent things we want to tell this person we’ve just left come to us suddenly. By then, we call her, shouting very loud, raising our voice considerably, gesticulating theatrically.”
It’s not a Catalonian thing only. It’s also very Portuguese, I guess. Anyway, this is me shouting from the other side of the street: Dear reader! The other day, you know, the electricity went out and I called the electrical company and this voice started: Your call is very important for us. How can I help? Thank you for waiting. I kindly ask you to wait one more moment. I need your full name. Fiscal number. Address. Telephone number. Thank you for waiting. Your call is very important for us. Later, I was on a plane and it was the same thing. Now there was a screen (instead of real-life flight attendants) and an amplified, bureaucratic voice repeating what to do in the “unlikely event” of an evacuation… Back in Lisbon, on the bus, more of that. The city’s landscape on the windows worked just fine (well, if you close your eyes to the ever growing gentrification), but the AI-voice coming from the speakers could not even pronounce the stops correctly. “Xábregas”, it said, trying to announce “Xabregas”. “Álges”, when it meant “Algés”. Wouldn’t it be better to have a recorded human voice saying these names? It would give someone a paid work and we would actually understand where the next stop is. But, no, some executive decided to be oh-so-modern and get a voice-bot for buses… So, here we are. Some of the writing I come across in bookstores seems to go in the same direction. Flat language, mechanical stories, vague characters.
A great antidote for this — how should I call it?, technocratization, functionalization, bureaucratization — of language is reading Josep Pla. The great Catalan writer who, as Dionisio Ridrujejo puts it, wrote pages more than books.
Reading him feels like a walk around villages, neighborhoods, ideas, stories. “How wonderful”, he says in his monumental and yet humble “El Quadern Gris” (pardon my English), “would be a watch shop of stopped watches and if you wish… turned around watches, as there’s nothing more calm-inducing than a stopped watch — a sleeping watch.”
We wander through these pages remembering, imagining, as “all memory concentrations over a precise image secrete voluptuousness”. Eventually, we forget about ourselves and then we’re home, kind of, because, you know, “happiness is a certain point of unconsciousness.”