1. Fortunately, time does not stop and the eclipse has already passed. With it, collective history, fueled by the media (the role played by 3Cat, or TV3, or whatever it's called now, will be the subject of some doctoral thesis in the future), has reached an unusual point and has made evident the degree of gregariousness we all carry with us. I hope the country's sociologists and anthropologists take this seriously and explain the mechanisms of this episode to us well. Not even the Spanish victory in the Football World Cup has fueled a phenomenon of these dimensions, at least in this country.2. As could be foreseen (and no expertise was needed), public transport, mainly Rodalies and the sinister society formed by Adif and Renfe, failed spectacularly. Everyone (or almost everyone) knew it, but people rushed to the stations, onto the trains heading south, on the morning of the eclipse. Surprising. Were any of the users trapped in that black hole unaware of the disaster they were about to experience? Years and years of mistreatment, shameful operation, lamentable services, institutional mockery, etc., are useless? Only to complain and lament that in Tarragona, on the way back, the disaster was consummated? What is wrong with the people of this country, with the regular users of Rodalies? And with those who are not so regular? I don't understand. Expecting Rodalies to work is exactly the same as wanting to see a solar eclipse in the middle of a snowstorm (when there were snowstorms).3. The country was already fumbling before the eclipse. Now it walks in the dark. We have descended one more step in the general erosion of public life. We have consumed the spectacle of the eclipse at sidereal speed and, when it became clear again, the country remained at the same point where TV3 left it before trying to abduct us with the spectacle. Climate change, droughts, and fires are in the usual place. The institutional eclipse is dragging on; pending files remain pending and full of dust; on top of the old ones, new ones are added. Suffocated by heat and stunned under an unforgiving sun, the invisible and silent Minister of Culture announces the possibility of throwing money into some national dance and theater companies, presumably public and well-paid. All this in a ministry that, like that of Linguistic Policy, is distinguished by its absolute discretion. They cost us money, but we must admit that they do not bother at all.

1. The ECHR's decision regarding the presence of the Catalan language in the education system has probably been the hardest blow this issue has received since the TC's ruling against the 2006 Statute.

Leo XIV is back in the Vatican. In Madrid, they continue with the usual political and media rhythm. In Barcelona, the Sagrada Familia is full of tourists, traffic is as bad as ever, and in El Raval and Brians I, life, complicated and hard, continues on its way, as if nothing had happened. In the Canary Islands, dinghies with immigrants from Africa will continue to arrive; they will be well received by people of good faith, or they will be rejected by the official authorities and the xenophobes and racists embedded everywhere. Life goes on and a long summer awaits us, overwhelming with heat and political, social, and cultural unease, as if Leo XIV had never come.

It had not been long since the Constitutional Court's ruling on the new Statute, when Professor Marc Carrillo, a professor of constitutional law at the UPF and a great expert in the contemporary legal history of Spain, warned us, in a work meeting of the Research Group on the Francoist and Democratic Eras (GREFD-UAB; currently, Research Group on Dictatorships and Democracies, GReDD-UAB), that everything that referred to the Catalan language in the public sphere had come out profoundly affected. In non-legal terms, in this area of the TC ruling, the most radical and retrograde Spanish nationalism had prevailed, the kind that has always maintained, since imperial times (returned to the present and for which King Felipe VI does not have to apologize because, as a very beloved novelist in Spain wrote, his predecessors brought them urban planning, sewers, and something else) until our days (more than 500 years!), that the nation is founded on language and religion; that is, the Spanish language and the most rancid Catholicism. With Catholicism fallen into disgrace, the language remained (and remains). The final result was a foregone conclusion.

"Then came days of orgiastic slaughter. Jews from all over the region, families in carts, women pushing their children in strollers, trains full of Jews, columns of Jews on foot were being dragged into the city, by the hundreds, by the thousands, and were being massacred everywhere, in the streets, in the fields, alive. They were being shot, shot at, I saw a German officer approaching and looking at a pretty thirteen-year-old girl who had just gotten off a train. Mordecai Striegler, a Polish Jew, escapee from various camps and ghettos, was telling the American journalist Meyer Levin about his life and survival one April day in 1945 in Buchenwald.