Fifty is a very dangerous age.

Five years after his last published diary, I don't know what dies (Affairs, 2021), Ramon Ramon (Catarroja, 1970) once again makes public pages from his private notebook. He is a writer of the null days without linewhich is the only valid program, but it spaces out the moments for editing its pages. It debuted in 2014 with Within the grass field (diary 2009-2012). At that moment I already noted his polished and supple prose. An example: "Coming along the highway, the copper light of the valleys and mountains of Maestrat has enveloped us like sunflowers. Even a very nearsighted person like me could make out the leafy details of vineyards and olive groves. The most poetic green, in these lands, is the one painted by the plow (…).

But Ramon Ramon, in addition to his style, already revealed his own thought processes of a certain complexity. In the following volume, Light in the dead end (2018), remained true to the constants already familiar to his reader: critical Europeanism, fidelity to his landscape, a certain misanthropy, a certain fondness for brothels, the ambiguous and multifaceted feeling of fatherhood…

In I don't know whatdies He confirmed his excellence and also his regard foroutsiderwhich is the most common way for a writer of worth to insert themselves into their time. Ramón quoted Hans Magnus Enzensberger"The more humanity advances, the more prone we are to disappointment." This volume contained notes on sadness, music, tenderness, frivolity, and friendship of great conceptual beauty.

If, as Ramon Ramon is convinced, every writer is a poor soul, it is between the lines, in his notebooks, that we discover the silent music of this great frustration, which some, rather optimistically, call literature. And now, to drive the point home, the author offers us the pages he wrote in 2020. Why single out a specific year? Because of the pandemic? Yes and no. In 2020, indeed, the coronavirus transformed its streets into ghostly sets for fantasy films. But it is also the year Ramon Ramon turned fifty.

Fifty is a very dangerous age. I also kept a diary, which was later published under the title of To be a personThe volume miraculously survived the liquid cataclysm of the October 2024 storm. And to this day, Ramon hasn't needed the elements to jeopardize his diary. He himself is his perfect storm. As outsiderHis judgment of his neighbors grows increasingly harsh. But when he finds a human being who deserves his respect and admiration, he shows it. The paragraphs he dedicates, for example, to remembering Aunt Estrella are priceless.

As for the arduous confinement imposed by the pandemic, he doesn't notice anything unusual. After all, what forces a writer to stay home? Later, when walks are permitted again, he will travel the Catarroja-Valencia route (barely 8 kilometers) several times and repeatedly pass along the Camí Reial, the one that, according to Juan F. Mira (which was born), was built on the Via Augusta.

The move from village to city doesn't suit the author well. He observes the destruction of the architectural heritage—the most visible legacy of Francoism—and feels that urbanity is a subterfuge for vileness. As soon as he leaves, he wants to return to his village, to his home, to his family. He just wants to keep filling notebooks. And how I understand.