Who is Ferran Sáez Mateu?
BarcelonaThe philosopher and columnist for the ARA Ferran Sáez Mateu He is a 61-year-old man who reads and writes, makes music at home (he plays and collects violins and violas, flutes and keyboards: he has a collection of 500 instruments), walks a lot around Barcelona, sleeps little (about five hours on average, until approximately 5:30 a.m.) and often remembers recurring dreams; He visits the Capuchin friars in Pompeii, buys antique books online, enjoys good wine and sake, cooks festive dishes (venison fricandeau and the like), is married to Maite (who speaks Chinese) and has a son, Octavi, has many interesting friends, teaches city classes, observes life passing by with attention (the hysterical and hyperactive coming and going of tourists and fellow citizens...), is puzzled by people's habits (and his own), and remembers the rural tedium of his childhood and adolescence in the village, Granja de Escarpe, which on the day he was born, a Midsummer's Eve in 1964, had zero inhabitants. And "childhood arrives when we grow old, because it is only a memory." Today, the public library where he read as a child bears his name.
This, in short, is the person who has written All things visible and invisible (Pòrtic, 2026), a diary in the style of Montaigne and Josep Pla, two of his key influences (he's also a follower of Fuster). A diary in which he rehearses, where he ponders and reflects on the unfolding of life, its ebb and flow, his own and ours, governed by the "problematic script" of "obligatory happiness," a life that, for our philosopher, evokes a "constant sense of estrangement." He begins it on January 1, 2025, and finishes it on his birthday, June 23, 2025. In half a year, a whole lot of things pass through his head, his stomach, and his feet. Ferran Sáez Mateu is a brilliant columnist and essayist, as is once again evident in this supposedly minor work.
Aside from the press (he completely ignores current events in his diary), what has Sáez been reading lately? Beyond the aforementioned authors, his usual travel companions, and biblical texts, he has paid attention to a varied menu: Umbral, Baroja, Eva Illouz, Pere Lluís Font, Eva Comas, Michel Clermont, the monumental biographies of Pla and Cambó – “few languages in the world possess cultural luxuries like Adorno, Richard Sennett, Ramón Andrés, Unamuno, Toni Güell, Emmanuel Carrère…” “You have to be open-minded, but not to the point where your brain might fall out,” he quips, quoting the jest by Isaac Asimov.
Outside the Economy of Distraction
He quit smoking a long time ago and has never been interested in football. He lives apart from social media and WhatsApp. That is to say, apart from the attention economy, which is the economy of distraction. He dislikes university bureaucracy, which "allows one to cultivate the illusion of order and to coddle arbitrariness." But he still finds pleasure in teaching, a profession that began 937 years ago, when the University of Bologna was founded. He has his routines, which include long weekend walks through Barcelona neighborhoods like Sant Genís dels Agudells, to name one that very few people have explored (I recommend visiting the old cemetery), or Torre Baró, which has recently become fashionable because of the film The 47Also Carmel, Trinitat Vella, Sarrià, and Pedralbes, "the saddest neighborhood in Barcelona." "There are quite extensive areas of Barcelona, as well as other large and even medium-sized cities in Catalonia, that have no solution, if we disregard the use of explosives."
He is not a naive optimist, but neither is he a cynic. He is rather a skeptic with hope, "a concept more theological than philosophical." He emphasizes that life is learning to die: that is what philosophy is dedicated to ("Death has never frightened me, but hospital food has. A lot of it"). "For a philosopher, meaning is the very search for meaning," he says. He also observes that "many contemporaries, unfortunately for them, have learned to live comfortably by renouncing Meaning." And he clings to a widely ignored piece of evidence: "All the truly important things in a person's life—beauty, love, spiritual fulfillment—are free. To enjoy their parodic versions, however, you always have to pay."
Intellectually prolific, he has published the essays in record time Presence of an absence ("spirituality is becoming interesting again because, in reality, it had never disappeared from our mental map") and The Happy Reckless One (regarding the fact that the idea of the noble savage continues to dominate our collective imagination), the novel with the title of an essay The other hypothesis (a futuristic dystopia) and, even at the end of 2024, two other works of thought: The end of enlightened progressivism (the left has abandoned equality and has grown strong in the defense of difference) and Lost intimacy (on the difference and historical genealogy of the concepts of intimacy and privacy).
It is no wonder, then, that power attracts him. Intelligence is alluring. "I have dealt with each and every one of the presidents of the restored Generalitat." Nor is it surprising that, for so much work, he possesses certain prosaic habits and certain emotional comforts: "Marital stability is based on the poetic elevation of a routine that is usually prosaic." He also boasts a roster of notable intellectual companions: Francesc Torralba, Anna Pagès, Juan Carlos Mélich, Miguel Seguró, Luis Cabrera, Gregorio Luri, Juan Camino, Ramón Masià, Fernando Suay, Enric Soria, Pedro Rovira... And some who are no longer with us, like Héctor Borrat, Josep Héctor Borrat.
With all of them, he has practiced a spontaneous, colloquial, philosophical—peripatetic—conversation, the kind that he knows will never be achieved by generative artificial intelligence. And with them, and with us, his readers, he has also shared the relentless diagnosis of the great postmodern parody, "that agonizing party that, against all odds, still lasts." We are fortunate that Ferran Sáez Mateu, strangely enough, also endures.