A spider web thread

I contemplate a small spider that is checking, in front of me, the web it has spread between the two bars of an iron railing. There is a light breeze and the mesh trembles and glimmers faintly. The spider walks across it from end to end like an owner inspecting their house. Where it passes, I can guess the soft rungs of the web, more or less the cells of a silver beehive, the colorless stained glass of a Gothic window. It checks by instinct, perhaps it doesn't even know it, in the same way that I do not know which part of myself is instinct and which is not.

The spider walks through the air and behind it, it seems that the cloud, the plane, and the birds float just like it. The spiderweb has caught my attention. The bit of current that passes through it drags along noises that the spiderweb captures and amplifies like a very fine mesh loudspeaker. The lady from the house across the street has come out as she does every Sunday morning to work in her little garden, and turns on a small radio. I hear the metallic clack-clack-clack of the pruning shears cutting a sprout, a leaf, a small branch. The spiderweb would ensnare the pruning, if it flew this far. My neighbor has four devilish little dogs that bark at everyone who walks down the street, going to or coming from the market. It is always the same people, who stop to talk to the neighbor, about the weather, about the mayor, about everyone's health. On the radio program they always play, every week, the same songs from when she was young: Delilah, Release me, San Francisco…

It is strange but it does not bother me. I see through the spiderweb a petal falling, a bee flying or hanging, a sparrow crossing the air, a tree moving, and a beautiful poem comes to mind that I always think Carner dedicated to Ophelia: “and every drop of fine dew, suspended”...

The spider is like my thought, which moves through the web that it makes itself and that from time to time captures some distracted insect, some fly for lunch. It is everything that happens inside the head, the automatism of pondering, which understands in the sense that it incorporates, nothing more.

I dedicate this article to Dolors Oller, who passed away the other day, but who must be reading it. “The capacity to admire is a basic virtue of the understanding for the good mental and moral growth of individuals,” she wrote. She was one of those robust columns that thought needs to weave between with words, the essential pillars of any culture, the Catalan one included. A great teacher and scholar, vital, beloved, one of the most conscious people I have known of the importance of literature, and one of the most generous.