Antoni Marí, a possibility

Antoni Marí, a powerful figure in Catalan literature, a penetrating and refined writer of both verse and prose, has died. Born in Ibiza and a Barcelonan by choice and conviction, Marí always gloriously followed his own path, dedicated to the task of deeply understanding the ideas that have allowed for the construction of modern Europe and verifying their validity in the ongoing construction of today's Europe. He had more dealings with abstract thought, and far more fruitful ones, than many of those who today sign their names and proclaim themselves philosophers with ridiculous shamelessness.

However, Marí didn't practice philosophy but rather writing, because that's what he was, and an excellent one at that, capable of building a coherent and supportive relationship between his books written in different genres: essays and art criticism, narrative, and poetry. He could be compared without embarrassment (not because of hypothetical similarities in style or content, but because of the vastness of his knowledge and the intellectual audacity with which he worked) to European authors of his time such as Magris, or Handke (whose death was also rumored, in one of those painfully false obituaries). As I said, they weren't alike, but in any case, Marí's writing was undoubtedly closer to Magris's sensuality and luminosity, to the Mediterranean, than to Handke's abrupt, Austro-Hungarian dryness, although Marí was quite at home within the realm of German idealism, which he embraced with fertile fervor. He also wrote about the French Enlightenment, English Romanticism, and post-war and post-avant-garde thought of the 20th century.

However, his writing was not dedicated to constructing cold autopsies within a morgue not to discard dead ideas, but to illuminate spaces of thought within European modernity that would allow us to give coherence and meaning to the dispersion of our time, all that Lyotard defined or anticipated, and—this is what literature does—to see how the abstraction of ideas connects and grafts itself onto the concrete lives of people, their longings, their failures. To see this process, to write about it, and to celebrate it.

The silver cup, The Vincennes road either Entspringen in narrative; The man of genius, The expressive will either The conflict of appearances in rehearsal; the Triptych from Jondal (made up of the books The prelude, A winter trip and The desert) and the recent Four sides In poetry, they are a literary legacy of the first magnitude, one that readers would do well to revisit and those who are not yet readers to discover. Taken together, Martí's books present a possibility: that, as a culture—as a nation—Catalans, islanders, and Valencians could be capable of trusting in our own capacity for civilization. To be a country inhabited by people more attentive to truth and beauty, as the classics taught, and less so to the blind spots of daily life and history. Antoni Martí's books are full of stories, proposals, and verses that ignite in the reader's mind and never fade. The possibility remains unexplored.