Those moments when life seems like the line of a perfect circle

BarcelonaThe book had been out for a few months In the land of wonders (Ángulo Editorial, 2025), by philosopher and professor Eulàlia Bosch, haunted my house. Unconsciously, it approached and moved away: the day it arrived, its colors insisted on being on the dining room table; at dusk, it waited patiently for an opportunity on the nightstand; the next day, with the arrival of a new book, it found itself displaced to the office desk. Days pass, and there are readings that never find their moment, until you finally start them and understand why you've always kept them close, taking an erratic walk around the house, avoiding relegating them entirely to the pile of pending titles that deep down you know you'll never read.

In the land of wonders It's a beautiful book. It is for many reasons. I'll tell you in a disorganized way, as she does; how to do it with all those thoughts that you know will still lead you somewhere. One of the reasons it captivated me—I couldn't stop reading it until the end, although now I think it would have been better to have enjoyed it little by little, appreciating each nugget of wisdom—is because at the beginning it often uses the verb move, which is one of the most beautiful that must exist in our language and which comes from Latin bullicare (to bring to a boil), which in turn derives from boil (boil) and noise (bubble); a form of existence that fills up until it explodes or spills over, like the relationship between the places Eulalia visits and the relationships of ideas they generate. I'd like to use this verb more; these days, Catalan flattens out for us as if the pages of a dictionary had been torn out.

Another reason: reading Eulalia has made me think again, as I have many times in my life, that Catalan museums are full of sensitive and talented women. Most don't make a big deal about it; they are discreet, passionately reflective, and find in art-related activities their main way of bringing sensitivity to a world that needs much of it. The book is a defense of lives that intertwine with the languages of art: "It's as if a vocabulary made of shapes and colors, movements and sounds, were adhering to the known alphabet, and with it, the perception of the world were both broader and more mysterious."

One of my favorite chapters is "A Beach, a Cave, a Mountain," in which the philosopher recounts those moments in which life seems like the line of a perfect circle that finally finds its other side and makes a cledo and is completed. I can certainly understand the intensity those moments must have had for Bosch (eating an oyster in the water of Port de la Selva; lying down in the Altamira cave; lighting a fire inside a circle of stones in a corner of the Alps). I'm sure I would have experienced them that way too. I admire that he can put words to these moments of lucidity, of fitting together the anecdote that we are and the world we inhabit, because they are moments filled with a sensation that is almost ineffable, quite corporeal and above all, in a different state of mind. I live for those clecs. Don't we all? This chapter made me think of Miró.

From the book, I would also highlight the brief and beautiful tribute to the curiosity of Maria Aurèlia Capmany, hidden within a conversation the author had with two women from New York; and the chapter dedicated to Jorge Oteiza; but like her, I'm highlighting it out of a fanaticism for the sculptor. In the land of wonders It's a collection of memoirs that, when you finish, leaves you wanting to schedule a meeting with the author to continue the conversation. When you turn the back cover, could there be a better taste?