The largest dinosaurs in the world lived in southern Argentina when the Andes and the Atlantic Ocean did not exist. Last Saturday, my children and I spent the night at the CosmoCaixa, camped under the replicas of the skeletons of those remote giants, who have become myths of the 21st century. It was a memorable experience: visiting the Dinosaurs of Patagonia exhibition with flashlights; attend a music and story show under the bone structure of a 38-meter-long Patagotitan mayorum; sleeping on the carpet surrounded by real and copied bones of enormous reptiles of yesteryear; tour both the Flooded Forest and the machinery that makes it possible in the morning.
It was also a very typical experience today. Young people are joining gyms en masse and are selling out concerts. We adults are buying vinyl, filling restaurants, traveling like crazy, going to the theater and museums like never before. Last year, Barcelona theaters broke the absolute collection record. The Prado Museum exceeded three million visitors for the first time; CosmoCaixa also broke its record, with more than 1,250,000. 2023 itself was – quantitatively – the best Sant Jordi in history. Children will fill La Petita, Sendak, Abracadabra and the rest of the children’s bookstores in this city starting Saturday, because they are used to visiting them all year round: books, like board games or crafts, are so important in their lives like TV and video games.
Everything is reality: both digital and analog. But physics is more real and true, because we perceive it with our five senses, while we only access virtual reality through two. The pandemic reminded us of that truism. And, although professional and intimate life merge in our daily interaction with screens, meetings, parties, artistic experiences or readings are in-person because they summon the presence of the body and soul with a force unknown to Gmail, Teams or Whatsapp.
On Saturday I used the same sleeping bag that I took to Patagonia twenty years ago. Worried about the news I saw on my cell phone, I slept fitfully. At some point I remembered my first camping trips, in the Creu de Canet, the smell of pine, the stars. My children’s first experience has been, however, with heating and indoors; but with a geographical and geological depth that I discovered much later. Missiles are raining in the Middle East. On the other side of the ocean, Milei savagely cuts Conicet’s budget, despite the fact that some of its scientists found traces of a titanosaur last week. But we were safe. The museum, like the bookstore or the theater or the cinema or the concert, protects us. Maybe that’s his superpower.
