Categoría: Op-Eds
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Reluctant warriors
A book by the British historian James Matthews has reminded me of some older men I knew when I was a child, as I helped them gather olives, or dig potatoes. The book is called Reluctant Warriors, and looks at a little-treated aspect of the Spanish Civil War: the conscript soldiers who fought in it,…
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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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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…