The philosopher and columnist for the ARA Ferran Sáez Mateu He is a 61-year-old man who reads and writes, makes music at home (he plays and collects violins and violas, flutes and keyboards: he has a collection of 500 instruments), walks a lot around Barcelona, ​​sleeps little (about five hours on average, until approximately 5:30 a.m.) and often remembers recurring dreams; He visits the Capuchin friars in Pompeii, buys antique books online, enjoys good wine and sake, cooks festive dishes (venison fricandeau and the like), is married to Maite (who speaks Chinese) and has a son, Octavi, has many interesting friends, teaches city classes, observes life passing by with attention (the hysterical and hyperactive coming and going of tourists and fellow citizens...), is puzzled by people's habits (and his own), and remembers the rural tedium of his childhood and adolescence in the village, Granja de Escarpe, which on the day he was born, a Midsummer's Eve in 1964, had zero inhabitants. And "childhood arrives when we grow old, because it is only a memory." Today, the public library where he read as a child bears his name.

Ferran Sáez Mateu He doesn't waste time on social media. He devotes himself to reading and writing, playing and listening to music, and walking. He lives a classic, old-fashioned, in-person life. He sleeps little and daydreams. Now he's written a disturbing novel with the title of an essay: The other hypothesis (Electa). A nightmare. The narrator is an old man, 141 years old, who doesn't have much time left before facing the state of LVF (Physical Vital Limit), set at 150 years old, and then becoming an EPV, that is, a person framed in the Permanent Virtual State, with a digitalized brain, without a biological body. At the end of the 22nd century, death is dead: it is an obsolete category.

I recently asked Ferran Sáez about his relationship with spirituality, and he pointed to an inconspicuous window located high above the room we were in. It was a gray day, natural light weakening against the artificial, and on the windowsill was a sparrow taking advantage of the building's shapes to shelter from the rain. "I could put a barrier between what we're doing here and that sparrow, between me and the world, but I choose not to," he said. We were in an auditorium at the Casa de Convalescencia, a jewel of Catalan Baroque civil architecture that serves as the headquarters for the Institut d'Estudis Catalans, at the end of a symposium dedicated to celebrating Sáez as a "contemporary classic" and deepening our understanding of his work. After four hours of academic presentations, on the periphery of a bubble of human achievement, the rest of the world continued to spin with a labored and calm indifference. It's one of those images that makes you look at yourself from the outside, and in that shift in perspective, you consider the possibility that there's something genuinely important beyond yourself.