The Little Prince

Sometimes I look around and see nothing but foolishness and nonsense. 

Mankind, too worried with power, wealth and technology, seems to have forgotten about the importance of sincere friendship and true love. Most people don´t even realise that "to forget a friend is sad. No every one has ever had a friend." 

A great deal of grown-ups, full of prejudices and misjudgements, are not sensitive to the poetry, mystery and beauty of the world. They are dull, unimaginative, ignorant and blind to the simple things that matter. They don´t even know that "the most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart."

Sometimes it seems to me that adults, so narrow-minded and absurd, are constantly rushing and stubbornly keeping on mindless pursuits, but at the end "no one is ever satisfied where he is." 

I´ve just finished rereading Antoine de St. Exupéry´s masterpiece (so proud to have been able to do it in French this time!) and, again, it has left me reflecting about the sense of life...

Sometimes, like The Little Prince, I am also bewildered by what I see and experience every day. Like him, I go on my quest for understanding the meaning of this strange world. And meanwhile, I continue gazing at the stars...

The Great Gatsby

So much violence and the nonsense of World War I left Americans in such a state of shock that those who could afford it turned to a wild life of excess to compensate. The unprecedented levels of prosperity of the nation enabled F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda, icons of the Roaring Twenties, to live extravagantly staying out late and drinking heavily in continuous lavish parties. The couple, who idolized wealth and luxury, was really fascinated by the very rich and all their magic. Their sprees continued in Paris, so full of youthful idealism, where they soon became part of a celebrated circle of American expatriates. 

But F. Scott Fitzgerald could also see through all that glitter of the Jazz Age, discovering the moral emptiness and hypocresy beneath this pointless pursuit of pleasure. The Great Gatsby is the tragic hero, solely faithful to a dream. All the wealth he has been able to achieve has only one aim; to recover his former love Daisy. But the mistake is to try to recapture the past and carry it into the future. His spiritual quest, in a materialistic society,  is to be defeated by selfishness and indifference.

The story represents the disintegration of the American Dream and those times of economic growth and loss of moral values should sound familiar to us. They turned out to be a warning sign of harder times to come. 

Shakespeare & Company Bookshop in Paris

"On a cold windswept street, this was a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books in the window, and photographs of famous writers both dead and living. The photographs all looked like snapshots and even the dead writers looked as though they had really been alive"

                                                                   Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

These lines depict Sylvia Beach´s Shakespeare & Company Bookshop, a haven for all English speaking writers in Paris during the interwar period and a gathering place for regulars like Hemingway, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald or James Joyce. With the German occupation of the city it was closed down, but a few years later, an American bohemian, George Whitman, would open another bookstore with the same name and the same ideals. It continued to be a free boarding house for aspiring and penniless writers and the new owner went on playing host to well known authors like Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett or the Beat poets W. Burroughs and A. Gingsberg. Whitman´s daughter runs it today, still managing to hold on its original principles.

I´ve recently visited it for the first time and I can assure you it´s worth it: on the floor, piles of second-hand books stacked there because there is no room left on the ancient wooden bookshelves; on the walls, old photos, drawings and newspaper cuttings yellowed by the years; an old typewriter, a piano waiting to be played, worn-out velvet armchairs for sitting and reading... An incredible place to hang out for those instilled with a deep and passionate respect for literature.

Take note! Facing Notre Dame Cathedral, on the left bank of the river Seine... It had to be situated in the legendary literary Latin Quarter..

The Mousetrap at the Niemeyer Centre

Agatha Christie´s The Mousetrap has been on stage in London´s West End since 1952, being the longest running play in the world. Its brilliant intricate plot still keeps engaging the audience from start to finish. 

Agatha Christie belongs to the Golden Age of the detective novel, during the inter-war period. Heiress of Conan Doyle´s tradition, her books were meant to be pure entertainment, games where readers matched wits with the author. One of her breakthroughs was to move crime from the predominantly urban world where it had always been set to the quietness of the English village; Monkswell Manor is the guesthouse where this extremely clever puzzle is set. The spectators are kept on the edge of their seats due to an atmosphere of shuddering suspense, suspicious clues, double identities, secret passions, hatred... and they are surprised at a tricky and startling denouement.

It was not in London, but in Avilés, at the Oscar Niemeyer International Cultural Centre, where I could also be captivated by this classic whodunit a few days ago. The project of the futuristic and controversial Centre was a present from the Brazilian architect to the Principality to give thanks for his Prince of Asturias Award for Art in 1989. 

We have just been told the great Oscar Niemeyer has passed away. He would have been 105 in a week.

Unforgettable books and stories

If I had to choose a single remarkable book from all those I have ever read, I would rescue one from my childhood: The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde.

Before being able to read it on my own, I remember my mum telling us the wonderful story of this charming prince.  Having turned a blind eye to the hardship and miseries of his people during his lifetime, he is now a golden statue on a tall column in the centre of a city, from where he sees nothing but ugliness and suffering. He feels such a great sorrow and sympathy for all that poverty that the sapphires that are his eyes weep. He cannot bear what surrounds him... A fairy tale of a prince without a princess, but with a swallow which plays her role, it reminds everybody of the importance of love, inner beauty, sacrifice and charity. What a moving and instructive story for a child! What a moving and instructive story for anyone!

Wilde used to say that he had not written it "for children, but for childlike people from eighteen to eighty". Once more, he was making witty and satiric allusions to contemporary issues like the tremendous gap between the rich and the poor. He did not only aimed at ridiculing and scandalising that rigidly conventional Victorian society, but also at attacking its lack of humanitarian feelings. The dangerous game he was playing would come in with a high price...

American elections, presidents and ... poetry!

In the USA, and every leap year, the general elections have been held on the first Tuesday following the first Monday of November since 1845. Due to the fact that the country was mainly an agrarian society, November was considered the most suitable month. The autumn harvest was over and the weather conditions were still mild for farmers to travel to the polling stations. This journey could take rural residents a whole day, so Monday was a convenient day to do it once they had attended their religious services on Sunday. The first Tuesday after the first Monday was chosen in order to prevent it from falling on November 1st, All Saints Day, a holy day of obligation for Catholics. A second reason was that it was on the first day of each month when merchants did their books from the preceding one.

Whatever the results, the presidential swearing ceremony does not take place until January. And, on this day of hope and introspection, poetry has been read on some occasions. At Kennedy´s inauguration, 87-year-old Robert Frost recited one of his poems. Maya Angelou did the same when Bill Clinton took his oath of office. 

Plenty of American presidents have been captivated by poetry. Jefferson often quoted the classics, mainly Homer, Virgil and Milton. Lincoln was keen on Robert Burns. T. Roosevelt was a devoted reader of poetry and he even wrote essays about it. Jimmy Carter, who adored Dylan Thomas, published a book with his own verses. W. Wilson was fond of limericks and he composed love poems. G. Ford knew Rudyard Kipling´s If by heart and it was his inspiration.

In one of his speeches Kennedy pointed out that "When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses"

Good reasons to read biographies

There is nothing more enlightening and inspiring than reading the life and work of great people. We live in a world built by the genius and creativity of human beings who have had the ability of achieving extraordinary triumphs and it may be instructive to know how their interesting careers have developed. In fact, their priceless lessons of experience can encourage us to start working for greatness on our own. Biographies remind us that history repeats itself. Even if the person we are reading about is unworthy of praise or admiration - we don't read about Martin Luther King or Hitler for the same reason - their real stories can be instructive and valuable.

When it comes to writers, analyzing their lives may help us understand their literary work better. Their experiences usually shape what they create. Let´s take the most intellectual and revolutionary of the British romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley, for instance.

Heir of a rich estate and educated in Eton and Oxford, he gave up everything to liberate humanity from misery. An atheist and anarchist, he was considered a pariah for his lifestyle. His first wife committed suicide by drowning in the Serpentine, in Hyde Park, when he ran away with 16-year-old Mary. Shelley was only 29 when he also drowned during a sudden storm while sailing in Italy. His unrecognizable fisheaten body was found on a beach. They knew it was him because of a volume of Keats' poems in his pocket. The corpse was burnt right there in presence of Byron and Leigh Hunt and his heart was given to his second wife, who would carry it with her in a silken shroud everywhere for the rest of her life. Mary Shelley, best known for her Frankestein, would work tirelessly to edite and promote his poetry.

Apart from getting a glimpse into the minds of these two artists, these are only a few facts which will certainly make us pay attention to certain aspects of their poems and stories we might otherwise miss or consider unimportant. Now we know that his obsession with thunders, water and evil images turned out to be prophetic. Her interest in the supernatural, the weird and the horrible also had an explanation.