Sant Jordi is a large public square, where philosophy should be, in the agora, where Socrates began it, with a hopeful message for people. And for that, I am grateful that after winning the Josep Pla prize – with Anatomia de l’esperança – there has been a qualitative leap in the number of readers.
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For me, this festivity has been a conglomerate of emotions. I have met readers who open their hearts completely and tell you about adversities like the death of a loved one, which I can understand because I myself narrated it in two books, and I understand this grief. For the first time, I dedicated a book to a deceased pet, named Brusi, like the newspaper. “Now I need hope, I live alone and the center of my life was my dog, who died yesterday,” said its owner, a widowed woman, distraught. There are also people looking for work and not finding it, or others who have had a sentimental breakup and want to move forward. You feel obliged to be a receptacle for this suffering, because in the short time the reader is in front of you, they give you a micro-story of their life, like a small secular confessional, and quickly, with the few biographical elements they give you, you have to think of a suitable dedication. Readers thank you for being there.
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The hope I speak of in the book is an essential virtue, a vital impulse, a basic inner strength to start any project, and even more so in the face of adversity, and perhaps that is why people come to find me, from young people starting university to retirees with projects like studying Latin, or who are widowed, have fallen in love and want it to work out: hope knows no genders or political options, all projects want to move forward and see their program realized. It is a very transversal audience in terms of age, convictions, gender – although mostly women – or territory, whether it be the Terres de l’Ebre, Lleida or Tarragona. And although many of my readers are Catholics who have heard me speak in a parish – I give many conferences and talks as a philosopher and as a theologian – many are not. I have always been interested in stepping out of my comfort zone.
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