BarcelonaThe way literature is going here and almost everywhere these days, no better candidate could be chosen for the Honorary Prize for Catalan Literature than Pere Lluís Font, man liberal, prudent and wise, as it is said of the Count of Almaviva at Marriage of Figaro, by Mozart. It's not that in other competitions the prize was awarded to some Cherubino, who is a mischievous young man who has yet to do anything notable. It's not that: the prize has gone to a man who has worked his entire life to ennoble the philosophical landscape in Catalonia: Catalan philosophy It cannot be said that we have had, nor would it be understood, just as it is not understood that there could be Catalan mathematics. Not everything can carry that adjective, and that is what the prestige of the homeland ultimately consists of.
Pere Lluís (his first surname is this, Lluís), always preferred to study rather than fill out academic forms, so his university career, despite being very brilliant, has known or encountered more than one obstacle. But in the end, he did what he had to do—learn, teach, guide, write, translate, edit—without having suffered any humiliation, which is already a lot.
Lluís is a theologian, as well as a philosopher and man of letters, and this allows us to assure that he perfectly knows the lesson of humility found in the first verses of the Cohelet biblical: Vanitas vanitatis te omnia vanitas, where the word vanitas It does not mean the same thing as the current vanity. vanitas with which Saint Jerome translated Hebrew hebel It was something else: evanescence, a thing without entity, a breath and nothing. Everything is evanescent in this life, everything happens and everything dies, everything we do is forgotten after centuries—not in universal terms, but almost—and it's better to keep this in mind so as not to harbor unfounded illusions.
Pere Lluís has always been a discreet, almost taciturn man, and he hasn't stopped working: this honors him, his language, and his country. And fate has had the good sense to reward him with a highly accredited distinction when he is already in his nineties. The award seems so grand to him, in every sense, that it's impossible for him to succumb to any feelings of pride or vanity. He was never famous like soccer players or television presenters—the former don't write soap operas; the latter, in torrents—and now he's received a well-deserved award when honors can no longer do him any harm.
Because the man or woman of study, they more than anyone, must fear this beast that spoils everything, fame, which, according to Virgil (Aeneid, IV), has many eyes and many mouths, and flies through the world at great speed. Pedro Luis has only two eyes, a single, unremarkable mouth, and has never practiced the reckless speed of the ambitious.
