I have spent a few summer hours reading Pedro Olalla, writer, Hellenist and filmmaker. His Words of the Aegean (Cliff) is a lucid walk on the sea that bathes the scattered islands in what tens of thousands of years ago, before the rising of the waters, was the mainland between present-day Greece and Turkish Anatolia that converges in the Dardanelles, it passes through the supposed Homeric Troy and enters the Black Sea through the Bosporus. How topical can be deduced from the reflections of this scholar who has lived in Athens since 1994.
The word, the sea, the stone and the landscape place them at the dawn of our civilization. The Greek and Latin classics are not only not dead, but are a source of inspiration for modern literature, history and science. Infinity in a Reed, by Irene Vallejo, is a fascinating journey into the world of books, words and thought since the beginning of time.
The most civilized peoples are those who have delved into the most ancient literature with ancient and traveling words, turning the language into a volatile ship of civilization. One of the main pillars of Catalan culture is the Bernat Metge collection, promoted by Francesc Cambó, in which the main Greek and Latin authors are published in the original language and in Catalan. It is a literary, philosophical and cultural jewel.
Pedro Olalla explains to his son Silvano the reflections he elaborates sitting in a corner of one of the many islands of the Aegean. He speaks, naturally, of the climate as a changing factor since the rotation of the Earth around the Sun does not take place on a stable axis.
And in turn, he deduces that the Earth’s climate changes not only due to terrestrial factors caused by the devastating action of humans, but also due to astronomical causes and due to the mechanics of the universe itself.
It is a literary vision, based on geographical and historical evidence of the inevitability of change on a planet that during the first half of its existence was “an inferno of gases, cataclysms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; then there were times when it was a silent white sphere, completely or partially covered with ice”. There have been seven great ice ages and now, although it may not seem like it, we are still in the last of them, as the Earth still maintains its dwindling and fragile polar ice caps. The author estimates that eighteen thousand years ago the ice from the north reached the shores of the Mediterranean.
That the predatory action of the consumerist society swimming in abundance has decisively contributed to climate change that can be verified in the passage of one or two generations is evidence. But the change is going to take place no matter how strict efforts are made to curb the abuses of humans mistreating nature.
The chronicler of The Washington Post Ishaan Tharoor reported yesterday the worst drought that Europe has known in the last five hundred years and the alarm created by the dry rivers, the lakes that are losing their flow and the swamps that show their historical entrails, hidden until now under the waters. A bridge from the first century has appeared on the bed of the Roman Tiber, probably built on the orders of Nero. In alpine Lombardy, on the shores of Lake Como, a 100,000-year-old deer skull and bone remains of lions, hyenas and rhinoceroses have been found.
Thermal exaggerations in Europe are occurring with greater intensity in China and part of Southeast Asia. But in parallel, torrential rains are unleashing in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and, many miles away, in Texas as well. Recent floods in Pakistan have caused more than a thousand deaths and ten million displaced people.
The fact that some parts of the Rhine, the great German industrial river, are not navigable may be a temporary phenomenon, but it shows that there are few spaces on Earth protected from a climate change that will have unforeseen consequences. Everything possible must be done, in the medium and long term, to neutralize the harmful effects of change. But the universe follows its cosmic course and has behaved unexpectedly with the Earth since the most ancient civilizations.
