I listen to Rosalía’s album Lux as rain sweeps across the garden. It feels like nightfall, though it is only midafternoon, and the daylight keeps trying to press through the clouds. If Motomami radiated a kind of dark brilliance, Lux speaks of a longing to glimpse a...
Upon waking, I listen to Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasy and Fugue in A Minor, performed on piano by Sviatoslav Richter. Richter was a melancholic man, though this music conceals it. Bach composed for the greater glory of God, while Richter interpreted him with a...
Every story is personal. There are no purely abstract histories, no memories of disembodied lives. Otto Dov Kulka's mother rode into the night in a train car. Through the window, she watched the desolate snow. When darkness fell, she quickly scribbled a few words on a...
For years, I hadn't listened to "The Crow" ("Die Krähe") from Schubert's Winterreise. Last night, amid the storm, I returned to this lied through an unfamiliar recording: the English tenor Ian Bostridge accompanied by pianist and composer Thomas Adès. I felt something...
In the waning days of his life, the French monarchist novelist and essayist Georges Bernanos penned a meditation on the twilight of civilization. This preoccupation, born of myriad concerns, consumed him. Exiled in Brazil, his fortunes depleted and his spirits low,...
Literature is a mystery, just like art or music, and in the early 20th century, Kafka stands at the very heart of that mystery. Last Monday marked the hundredth anniversary of his premature death in Kierling, Austria. Today, we interpret him as one of the seismographs...
This long conversation between Bishop Erik Varden and Daniel Capó has been published, in its Spanish translation, in the February issue of Ecclesia magazine. In a recent gathering in Madrid, you recalled that old adage from the Desert Fathers, attributed to Saint...
If the wise Chesterton once argued that hate unites societies more than love, perhaps it can also be said that resentment defines our character as much, if not more, than our desires. Tell me what or whom you hate, and I will tell you who you are and how you think....
This Sunday, on the occasion of the death of Pope Benedict, the German novelist Martin Mosebach wrote a beautiful reflection in Die Welt. He identifies a key fact which permits us to understand a thread that united Joseph Ratzinger with the faith he professed: ‘On...
Several years ago I took my family on a tour of the US northeast with two American friends. One summer day we traveled north from Washington D.C. to Cape Henlopen a wooded State Park on the Delaware seashore. There, a ferry was to take us across the bay to New Jersey...
Diego S. Garrocho reminded us in the pages of ABC that "almost all geniuses have some sadness". And of tragedy, I would add, which is the continuous bass of the creator: the music that imposes itself even in spite of the apparent joy of its lyrics. Here, I call...
The return of History has also meant the return of the United States to the European stage. Without America's self-absorption, and without its previous withdrawal that left behind a power vacuum, Europe would not have fallen -once again- into war. Bruno Maçaes has...
Únete y recibe todos los artículos en tu mail