Foto: Doisneau
Como ahora no hay maestros ni alumnos, el alumno preguntó a la pared: ¿qué es la sabiduría? Y la pared se hizo transparente.
No cabe duda: de niño,
me perseguía el sol.
Andaba detrás de mí
como perrito faldero;
despeinado y dulce,
claro y amarillo:
ese sol con sueño
que sigue a los niños.
(El fuego de mayo
me armó caballero:
yo era el Niño Andante,
y el sol, mi escudero.)
Todo el cielo era de añil,
toda la casa, de oro.
¡Cuánto sol se me metía
por los ojos!
Mar adentro de la frente,
a donde quiera que voy,
aunque haya nubes cerradas,
¡oh cuanto pesa el sol!
¡Oh cuanto me duele, adentro,
esa cisterna de sol
que viaja conmigo!
Yo no me conocí en mi infancia
sombra, sino resolana.
Cada ventana era sol,
cada cuarto eran ventanas.
Los corredores tendían
arcos de luz por la casa.
En los árboles ardían
las ascuas de las naranjas,
y la huerta en lumbre viva
se doraba.
Los pavos reales eran
parientes del sol. La garza
empezaba a llamear
a cada paso que daba.
Y a mí el sol me desvestía
para pegarse conmigo,
despeinado y dulce,
claro y amarillo
ese sol con sueño
que sigue a los niños.
Cuando salí de mi casa
con mi bastón y mi hato,
le dije a mi corazón:
—¡Ya llevas sol para rato!—
Es tesoro —y no se acaba:
no se me acaba —y lo gasto.
Traigo tanto sol adentro
que ya tanto sol me cansa.
Yo no conocí en mi infancia
sombra, sino resolana.
El sábado fui al estreno de ¿Te acuerdas de Lake Tahoe?, la nueva película del paisano Fernando Eimbcke.
Berlinale 2008: Daniela Valentina, Fernando Eimbcke, Diego Cataño, Juan Carlos Lara
Puente internacional Reynosa - McAllen sobre el Río Bravo
Puente internacional Ciudad Hidalgo - Tecún Umán sobre el Río Suchiate«Como que no había razones para rejuvenecer»
M. Sholojov en Sangre extraña
Si la viejecita de la Brasserie Lipp conociera Sun City, habría sido –supongo– menos severa. Delbert E. Webb (1899-1974), un magnate californiano, copropietario de los Yankees, materializó esta utopía cuyo nombre recuerda aquella otra propuesta por Tommaso Campanella. Webb inauguró el complejo residencial el primer día de 1960 a las afueras de Phoenix con tanto éxito que poco después mereció un reportaje de portada en Time. Sun City es el auténtico paraíso (artificial) de los snowbirds, como se llama en Norteamérica a las personas mayores, generalmente pensionados, que huyen en los inviernos hacia el sur. Esta red de ciudades-sol serpea por los estados del sur: California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Florida, South Carolina… Tan sólo en las localidades desarrolladas en Arizona habitan más de 40,000 personas.
En la inigualable Sun City todo sucede excepto el tiempo. Hoy día ha devenido, para efectos prácticos, en una marca comercial exclusiva para los mayores de 55 años – la media de edad está arriba de los 73 años. Mudarse allí (no hay cabida para retirarse, sólo para mudarse) significa algo más que eludir el frío: se escapa a la impiedad de la vejez. Como lo delata su propio nombre, el verano es eterno, y también la juventud. “Aquí no hay tiempo para envejecer”, constata Ria Schwärzel[1]. He ahí su éxito. A diferencia de la parisina pillada por Cartier-Bresson, los ancianos de Sun City no miran con resquemor a los (inexistentes) jóvenes porque, al imitarlos, viven en un eterno fin de semana: campos de golf, bolos, piscinas, talleres para el trabajo artístico y manual, centros de ocio, gimnasios, jardines, teatros y cines, recintos musicales, tiendas… nada falta en esta arcadia solar.
Sin embargo, ante la perspectiva demográfica actual y sus tendencias, que rebasan las estructuras hoy existentes, resulta imperioso imaginar nuevas soluciones. De este lado del Atlántico preocupa la articulación de tres factores: la decreciente tasa de natalidad, la longevidad de las nuevas generaciones y la cada vez más temprana jubilación. Los analistas calculan –por referir el caso alemán– que hacia el 2050 la población mayor de 60 años se duplicará en el país, para representar a más del 50% total. Mantener las estructuras aún vigentes implicaría doblar el personal al cuidado de los ancianos, algo económica y estadísticamente inviable.
La profesora Christa Olbrich (Maguncia, Alemania) sugiere que la solidaridad sería la respuesta adecuada a dicha problemática. Consecuentemente dirige un programa piloto en una comunidad multigeneracional donde muchas personas de edades diferentes comparten zonas comunes y se ayudan entre sí. El trato con gente joven ofrece a las personas de más edad la posibilidad de mantenerse activos, de prestar ciertos servicios a otros, en una palabra, de enriquecer a otros con sus años y experiencia. No son pocos los que han encontrado un sentido a cada día. A cambio, alguien cuida de ellos. Los niños, por su parte, aprenden a respetar y valorar a los mayores.
El Foro para la vida en común[2] constata que los ancianos evaden ahora las residencias de retiro y buscan nuevas opciones para continuar integrados en la sociedad. En el transcurso de este año, por ejemplo, ha recibido alrededor de 15,000 solicitudes. Dicho Foro agrupa no sólo a los interesados en compartir su vida con otros, sino a todos aquellos relacionados por una u otra razón con estos hogares multigeneracionales como abogados, arquitectos o constructores. Poco a poco toma cuerpo una pequeña revolución que redefine aspectos legales y técnicos de construcción: rampas para sillas de ruedas y carriolas, supresión de escaleras, espacios generosos, e incluso detalles prolijos como la instalación de picaportes y apagadores a una altura cómoda para todos. Otros complejos más ambiciosos incluyen tiendas, áreas recreativas y consultorios médicos.
También en Estados Unidos comenzaron a multiplicarse a partir de 1990 los hogares multigeneracionales. A diferencia de los alemanes, ellos se reúnen ante todo con parientes en diferentes grados sin albergar a desconocidos. Según último censo, ya el 4% de los hogares en el país son de este tipo, y el porcentaje aumenta sin pausa[3]. Este fenómeno revierte la tendencia de los 140 años anteriores, en los que el número de habitantes de cada casa se encogió siempre.
Nos son desconocidos los sentimientos que habitaban a la anciana de la Brasserie Lipp. Cabe tan sólo conjeturarlos. Sí podemos asegurar, en cambio, que en este nuevo modelo de vida un anciano alemán difícilmente reprobará con la mirada a su vecina, aún cuando vista faldas tan cortas como las octogenarias tenistas de Sun City.
Berlín. Octubre, 2007.
[1] Cfr. Nina Rehfeld, “Zum Sterben hat man in Sun City keine Zeit”, F.A.Z. – Feuilleton, octubre 18, 2007, p.46.
[2] Forum Gemeinschaftliches Wohnen e.V. (www.fgwa.de).
[3] Cfr. Mireya Navarro, “Families Add 3rd Generation to Households”, New York Times, mayo 25, 2006.
Next to her on the WallyPower boat 118...
... or visiting the Stones' art cave in Napa Valley...
... approaching Notre Dame du Haut...
...or about to bungee-jump from le viaduc du Millau.
From
The elusive nature of the world’s most famous brand, not to say the curious road to its definition, will be illuminated next week as never before when the Library of Congress unveils an addition to its permanent collection nicknamed “America’s baptismal document.” The document in question, a four-and-a-half-foot-by-eight-foot map, will be receiving national-treasure treatment more appropriate to a Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster. After all, in its 200-year history, the library has never waited longer, nor paid more, to acquire any single object: 100 years and $10 million were spent obtaining this last surviving print of a map of the world made in 1507 by an obscure German cartographer, Martin Waldseemüller — a map that happens to feature the first use of a certain seven letter word with an understandable appeal to our de facto national library: “America”. To house this treasure, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has built an encasement. At 2,000 pounds, its pressurized, argon-gas-filled environment is the largest case of its kind — big brother to the only other such cases NIST has made, those that protect the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The Waldseemüller map, of course, is no charter of freedom, but as both it and the “America” it coined turn 500 this year, the map’s prominent inclusion in the story we tell about ourselves offers a glimpse at a kind of lexicographic liberty — how a word acquires meaning, often despite itself. For the story of the naming of America is one we think we know: Amerigo Vespucci, that famously self-promoting explorer, outfoxed not Columbus the discoverer but Columbus the marketer and managed to wheedle his name onto a whole hemisphere of continents he didn’t deserve. “Strange,” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “that broad America must wear the name of a thief. Amerigo Vespucci, the pickle-dealer at Seville, who . . . managed in this lying world to supplant Columbus and baptize half the earth with his own dishonest name.” The only problem with this story — one in which America’s name harbors a prophetic seed of self-promotion that later flowers into a full-fledged huckster’s paradise — is its inaccuracy. The real story is more telling still, and begins with Waldseemüller.
Created collaboratively in 1507 in the French town of St. Dié by Waldseemüller and his humanist colleagues, their ambitious series of woodblock prints represented the most comprehensive collation to date of the Western world’s geographical knowledge, crediting Columbus and Vespucci by name for features discovered during their explorations of a few years earlier. A handbook published with the map offered Waldseemüller’s reasoning behind placing — in the southern quadrant of his map’s western hemisphere; on a lumpy banana of land meant to be the continent to our south — the name “America”:
[A] fourth [continent] of the world . . . has been discovered
by Amerigo Vespucci. Because . . .
Europe and Asia were named after women, I can
see no reason why anyone would have good reason
to object to calling this fourth part Amerige,
the land of Amerigo, or America, after the man of
great ability who discovered it.
The “good reason” to object to calling it “the land of Amerigo” would have been that among Vespucci’s “great abilities,” discovery wasn’t one. Waldseemüller seems to have been misled by a document known as the Soderini Letter, a narrative account said to have been by Vespucci but believed by modern scholars to have been forged by unscrupulous publishers. The letter reports that our shores are populated by giants, cannibals and sexually insatiable females — and implies that Vespucci reached this mundus novus pornographicus before that fellow Columbus. Though Felipe Fernández-Armesto, author of this year’s excellent “Amerigo”, makes very clear that Vespucci was not above self-promotion, he also argues persuasively that Vespucci had nothing to do with the Soderini Letter, nor therefore the elevation of his name to hemispheric heights. Waldseemüller seems to have later wised to his own credulity, removing “America” and replacing it with “Terra Incognita” on his subsequent maps. Still, he couldn’t erase the path his first map cut through the world: “America” had spread across maps and globes and minds, irreversibly.
Whereas Waldseemüller’s map seemed to have disappeared irretrievably. Despite what was said to be an initial printing of 1,000 copies, none were known to have survived into the 19th century, until an Austrian Jesuit priest named Josef Fischer, who taught high-school geography and history at a boarding school, finally found one. In a footnote to his forgotten opus, “Discoveries of the Norsemen in America,” Fischer recalls his scholarly sleuthing in a German castle: “I had spent two days in carefully examining the contents of Prince Waldburg-Wolfegg’s library. The following day I came across a Codex, elephant folio, dated 1515.” In it, Fischer found a rare engraving by Albrecht Dürer that was “carefully entered in the catalog of the unique Wolfegg collection of engravings.” What was not noted in any catalog were the folio’s further contents: several large maps that sat unnoticed for some 300 years — one of which featured an unlikely detail. “I turned over some more sheets,” Fischer explained, “and on Sheet 9, I found ‘America’ printed in large type.”
Fischer knew what that “America” meant, but what — beyond Emerson’s erroneous sense of America embodying a hidden fraudulence — does “America” mean? Vespucci’s given name is said to derive from the Old German Almaric, which literally means “work ruler” — a derivation that one nomenclatural historian called “a curiously appropriate title for the new world of labor and progress.” Curious indeed, given that those who first heard it would have thought retirement: Waldseemüller’s map claimed America was filled not merely with giants and loose natives but also with piles of gold. In any case, the word quickly took on the talismanic power that foreign names often do. “America” has stimulated generations of imaginations, filling them with hope for something better or hatred of something worse. The “America” of
And it is, in fact, a similar chance for redefinition that the Library of Congress is now providing visitors. Yes, the case, which dwarfs those of our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution, is somewhat grandiose, perhaps suggesting a characteristically American presumption. And yet, if we can see past the 600-pound piece of glass and the argon gas within and stare at a space on the map barely an inch long occupied by seven significant letters, you cannot help seeing an “America” that, very briefly, has been shorn of all meaning. It is — and most usefully — once again a newly minted word, one that might still mean anything.
“I have already mentioned some of the lessons I believe I have learnt about philosophy: the ramifications which make study of the physical universe and of the mind relevant to each other, and to how to live. But what have I learnt about the history of philosophy, since I started in 1980 to read it as a continuous and continuing story, instead of skipping from one famous name to the next? I have already mentioned my first lesson, that intermediate philosophers may be needed for understanding later ones. In addition, I had learnt how ideas can be transmuted. One striking example was the transmutation of a Stoic theory of how to avoid agitation into a Christian theory of how to avoid temptation. Another was the harmonization of Plato and Aristotle, which, in the Neoplatonism, produced a new philosophy that was identical with that of neither.
But I also got a sense of how ideas can be revived in very different contexts. Berkeley’s idealism was designed to solve a problem ok knowledge – if we know only the ideas in our minds, how can we know about tables and chairs outside our minds? Answer: tables and chairs are bundles of ideas in the mind, sometimes of ourselves and always of God. This, I came to realize, is a revival of the fourth-century theory of St Gregory of Nyssa. Material objects, he said, are bundles of God’s ideas. But his reason was to do with a quite different problem converning causation. If cause must be like effect, how can an immaterial God have created a material world? Answer: the world is not material in the way you think. Material things are bundles of God’s ideas. Same theory: different reasons. Of course, Berkeley may have known of Gregory, and he does give Gregory’s reason as a supplementary one.
[...] I am inclined to wonder if there are any ideas that could not be revived in a new context.
The possibility of reviving ideas is part of what gives point to philosophers studying the history of philosophy. It liberates us from the circle of ideas which happen to be most recent and expands the philosophical imagination. The opposite utility has also been illustrated, that history can make us question the soundness of some of our inherited presuppositions, as with the supposed harmlessness of killing animals.
This idea of history as liberating contrasts with the view that we are trapped in our circles of ideas and the ancients in theirs. On this view, ideas are so tied to the context of a given time that we can easily say they could not have been thought of before that date, or could not be taken seriously after it. There are also ideas, on this view, so entrenched that we can foresee that our own circle will not give them up. Again, history, on this view, mereley shows us why we have inevitably come to adopt certain views, and discard others. This is the opposite of what I think.
Admittedly if we revive an idea, we may need to detach it from its original background, as ideas about when it would be just to go to was may get detached from their backgraound in natural law. But detachability is not only an interesting historical phenomenon. It is also what helps to make ancient ideas directly applicable to modern philosophy, or, as in the examplo of justice in war, to life. As historian, one must be keenly aware of the original background, or one will miss significan differences. As philosopher, one may consider how far the background can be detached.
I do not wish to deny that there are limits to the repetition of ideas. A particularly itneresting one which I have mentioned is that I have found at most likeness, never exact similarity, in the case of non-Buddhist Indian philosophy, perhaps partly because it was until recently the guarded preserve of Brahmins who felt the west could teach them about technology, but not about philosophy.
To return to the ramifications of philosophy, they are so extensive, and the cultures which have studied them so varied, that Gregory of Nyssa’s charming idea is surely right: there is room for the understanding to make perpetual progress and one need never grow tired.
