Categoría: English
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Lost heritage
Approaching Úbeda from the south, the church of San Lorenzo is hard to distinguish from the old city wall, having been built against one of its towers and out of the same reddish sandstone, like so many old buildings in Úbeda. In the façades of great houses, built of blocks of dressed stone, the stone…
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Sunday stroll
Today I have company on my Sunday stroll in Madrid. We are dressed comfortably for walking, with biscuits and water in the knapsack. We have about an hour’s walk ahead to reach the Prado Museum, where I have suggested to Arturo that we see the Raphael showing. Arturo is 25, and has visited museums with…
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The Stendhal vice
Natural style in writing is probably an invention of Stendhal. The master, of course, is Montaigne, but his language is now archaic and requires so many spelling modernizations and explanatory footnotes. Stendhal is like us. His diaries of two centuries ago read as if they had just been written, or rather, were just in the…
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Moby-Duck
There are books that someone plans and writes in an orderly fashion about a particular topic. There are others that seem to write themselves and grow, guided more or less blindly, by the power of an obsession. Some years ago, Donovan Hohn happened to read the story of a shipwreck that occurred in 1992 in…
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Hush, Memory
A TALL structure, vaguely temple-shaped and covered with long sheets of canvas, stands on a busy intersection right by the Atocha railway station, in downtown Madrid, where bombs planted in commuter trains went off on the morning of March 11, 2004, killing 191 people. This memorial to the victims of that terrorist attack will undoubtedly…
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We Don’t Want to Be Alone
It has been an uneasy week for the citizens of Madrid. Not because we are new to the fears and destruction of terrorism. We have long known how fragile human life is and how easily disaster can be sowed in the places that seem safest. And yet, we have often felt alone. Many times, it…