Day: March 11, 2005

Dateline:  Barcelona

"reality´s administrative support staff" – nice line from an editorial in El País this morning, regarding the Spanish parliament´s review of the events of March 11, 2004. 

I got into Barcelona night before yesterday – late weds. night I guess that would be.  A large, cosmopolitan city, where one could spend years exploring, I´m sure.  Once again, I must reiterate my own inadequacy as a conventional tourist – so far I´ve spent most of my time just strolling around random neighborhoods, taking the subway to interestingly named but otherwise unremarkable stops, for example I visited an area called "Pep Ventura" yesterday – a delightful name for a rather uninteresting community. 

I did make a visit to the Sagrada Família – Gaudí´s unfinished masterwork and, truly, an inspiring, incredible, unparalleled bit of architecture.  With the sun turning the curves and twists of the stone pink and orange, I made two full orbits of the temple from the outside, but ended up avoiding entering the interior, having been overwhelmed by the vast herds of japanese tourists and catalonian youth groups queued ahead of me. 

Impressionistically, Barcelona, as might be expected, so far makes me think rather often of Buenos Aires or México, DF.    Despite the predominance of the catalán language over the spanish, at least in signage, the city is clearly Iberian to the core, and thus has more in common with those ibero-american metropoli than with, say, the italian cities it shares more with in historical terms.   Being so cosmopolitan, one hears any number of languages on the street, in any neighborhood – but castillian and catalán predominate.  Catalán is a fascinating language, although occasionally I get the unfair feeling that it´s all a sham, something to confuse the castillans with, kind of like a children´s secret language.  Imagine what french would sound like, if spoken by a spaniard who was under the mistaken impression that all those silent letters had to be pronounced. 

That´s catalán for you.  Not to put it down – I love the way that all these romance languages form a continuum, and I confess that in my more philological, tolkienesque moments I have even toyed with "inventing" my own romance language, picking and choosing etymons and phonological patterns from among all the players: castillian, portuguese, gallego, provenzal, french, italian, corsican, sicilian, romanch, rumanian, etc.  Tolkien did something very similar with the celtic languages – that´s what his "elvish" is, after all – just a giant hodgepodge of celtic roots and phonological transformations, drawing from gaelic, welsh, breton, brythionic, cornish, etc. 

Now that´s what you call a reality administrator.   The argentine author, Borges, in his story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertia, presents the idea of a secret society dedicated to inventing a new, imaginary world, and making it reality.  Sans the secret society part (ahem, as far as we know), both Gene Roddenberry´s Star Trek and Tolkien´s middle earth have come tantalizingly close to making such a plot-line come true.  Witness the story about the supposed offer of Multnomah County, Oregon, to offer translation services to the Klingon-speaking immigrant community (this may be an urban myth, but google "Klingon" if you don´t think the language is real).   OK… whatever – many of you have heard me discurse ad infinitum on this sort of subject before.

I´m somewhat frustrated that I am most definitely running out of time on this little adventure of mine, and feeling that I really haven´t done that much.  Definitely the flu I contracted in Poland made for lost time …. but overall, it´s mostly that I´m travelling in a manner I haven´t, hitherto, had much success at – I´m not so good at the "touring" sort of tourism, and much better at the "pick someplace and stay there a few weeks / months / years" sort of tourism – though I suppose this latter isn´t, in the end, tourism anymore.   But at least I´ll be able to say "I´ve been there" for what that´s worth. 

As I´ve mentioned before, I feel very much at a loss what it is I want to do next with my life.  I talk alot about starting a business, going to business school, whatever, but ultimately, these things still feel like default activities – things I can do to fill time until something cool comes along.   Singlemindedness seems like an enviable asset to me, most of the time – I simply don´t have it, though I´m capable of emulating it for sustained periods, as my recent career experiences have demonstrated.  But even in the depths of the singleminded pursuit of something, I´m never, genuinely, singleminded.  I´m just sort of pretending to be singleminded, in hopes of fooling the world and myself.   The world is often fooled – but myself, never.