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.

"Literary genres don't exist. For me, either there is literature or there isn't. We know what painting, architecture, sculpture, and music are—things change after John Cage—but it's not the same with literature. What is literature, and where do we find it? I can recognize it immediately: literature. I find it very evocative: literature. It excites me." Antoni Marí I used these words in 2012 to introduce Book of Absences (Tusquets), a magnificent example of the cultivated, demanding, and dazzling literary endeavor of the author born in Ibiza in 1944, who died in Barcelona at the age of 81. Shortly afterward, he added: "Literature is about fixing and dispelling the darkness."

The poem—because it is a single poem in four cantos: unitary, narrative, of philosophical ambition—begins with the memory of an old family clock, tall and bulky, which for many years had been repudiated by everyone because of the noise of its mechanism: "And I fear that it reminds you of when you are a tree." In the second canto, the poet—or, strictly speaking, the "I" of the poem—evokes that on such a day as the one described, February 28, 2024, his mother would have turned 107. And these two elements—the old baluerno of the clock and the birth of the mother—promote a serious and sustained reflection on the mystery of time and memory. We must add the constant, tutelary presence—which we already find in the wink of the title—of the Four quartets of T.S. Eliot, a work that also meditates deeply on our dying nature and the irredeemable condition of time.