If the life of Alessandro Baricco (Turin, 1958) had a soundtrack, it would be with classical music. As a young man he already went to concerts, he worked as a music critic and his partner is the pianist Gloria Campaner. Despite the chronic leukemia he suffers from, which made him go to the hospital to undergo a bone marrow transplant, he remains active and has just published A Brief Heretical History of Classical Music (Ara Llibres, with translation by Maria Llopis). These days he has traveled around Catalonia to give a talk at the CCCB with the composer Joan Magrané and has inaugurated the meetings at the Cap Roig Gardens with a conversation with Josep Ramoneda.

This weekend, the splendid Cap Roig Gardens, perched above the coves of Palafrugell, have become the luxury setting for the second Cap Roig Encounters, organized by the La Caixa Foundation and the magazine La Maleta de Portbou, united under the initiative of the European School of Humanities. The symposium brings together writers, scientists, philosophers, and artists from diverse disciplines around the theme "The meaning of nature," which invites reflection on the relationship between humans and the natural world.

Angélica Liddell does not want to be buried, but devoured: "If I die right now, throw me out so they can quarter me and eat me," she said this evening in the conversation that closed the first day of the Biennial of Thought. "I would like to be a victim of cannibalism. Deep down, eroticism has a lot of cannibalism in it. That nothing would be left to bury, that it would remain in stomachs, that it would pass into the blood, into the cells," added Liddell, who spoke with writer Luna Miguel to present her first novel, Silk Road (Malas Tierras), and the poetry collection I ask for the end of life (La bella Varsovia). If not, she would like to end up in the Montparnasse cemetery, where she visits references like Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett, Baudelaire, and Cioran, "with a tombstone that says nothing." "Although it doesn't matter: even if my name is on it, no one will know who I am," she lets slip.

"What can we do? How can we act? How do we invite action?" These are some of the questions asked during the presentation of the Biennial of Thought, which for ten years now—this being its fifth edition—has turned Barcelona's public squares into a place for debate and reflection. In an increasingly dark world, ideas are more welcome than ever, and this year the reflections do not aim to be nostalgic or apocalyptic, but rather aspire to focus on the present with the motto "Unleashing the present".