To know how on earth I should see this eclipse, I read a book. I recommend it to you: On Astronomy: Its Origin and the Origin of the Laws of the Universe,from 1863. I haven't understood anything. This reaffirms me in the fact that the Universe, as Woody Allen said, is expanding, expanding… Is it a spasmodic bubble gum? The cheese in the shape of a taut bow without an arrow of a bikini? I would like to ask the author, but the ouija board doesn't suit me. What's up? Hey, wait.
Yes, it's Joan Agell Torrents at the helm. A sage who wanted to embrace the whole Universe. A 4x4 scientist. First professor of chemistry at the University of Barcelona. And rector. Wow! It's a cosmos, everything he thought, researched, wrote, did. But he was a being who jumped planets: councilor for Culture of the Barcelona City Council, deputy in the Spanish Congress, president of the Economic Society of Friends of the Country, first president of the Catalan Athenaeum, which would later become the Barcelona Athenaeum, and of which he would be a co-founder! Wow! Let's see, I think he wants to tell us something important. Do you hear it? Tick, tock… It's the telegraph he invented in 1845. Tick, tock... It could transmit more than forty signals per minute. Tick, tock…
Ah, of course! He says he's from a micropopulation. From Sanaüja. From the hinge Segarra. Also from this natural sliding door of the Llobregós valley was the great Carmelite collective reformer Joan Bullo, first procurator general before the Holy See. And one of the composers who shook Europe sonically, Francesc Xavier Andreví. And the man of ice creams, pastries, socialized sweetness Farga-Farggi, Jesús Farga. And what is Sanaüja? The galaxy of micropopulations.
The micropopulations of Catalonia are the other side of the country's cut watermelon smile. They are practically 50% of the municipalities of Catalonia (there are 484 micropopulations). 51% of the extension (16,298 square kilometers). They are almost two hundred thousand people: 2.5% of the Catalan population. But Catalonia is at stake here. Catalonia is this: the watermelon slice of the immense minority that are the micropopulations and the small majority that is the metropolitan area of Barcelona and the large cities of the DF of Catalonia (Lleida, Tarragona, Girona, Balaguer, Reus, Figueres…). The real Catalonia is this and it is also this. Do you understand? Has the Catalonia of the future always been this and is it also this? Yes? Catalonia is a watermelon.
We tasted it last Saturday in Sanaüja. The Association of Micropobles of Catalonia (in collaboration with the Horitzons Foundation) awarded the prizes for the Micropobles Floral Games. It was visible on the faces of those children. Of those poems, of those stories. Perhaps like the one the poet Joan Margarit had in 1938, when he was born in Sanaüja. Despite the War, the hope of that eternal summer slice of watermelon in the eyes of children. How many Catalan writers have micropobles given birth to? Shall we start the list? By Jacint Verdaguer? And scientists, entrepreneurs, doctors, engineers, astronauts… Would Barcelona exist, without the people from micropobles? How many Joan Agells have built the real Barcelona?
It is skyscraper culture, a creation in capital letters. It is not micro: it is macro. It is not small, it is big, immense, infinite, astral, celestial, cosmic, galactic... Like the Universe. Because the Universe is here.
