To a sentimentally wise and publicly admired person, I recently heard him say, “No doubt I am very angry to die.” Just as it is, without dramatizing neither the words nor the gesture. Lucidity and verbal economy. And synthesis ability. All of him absent of fears. Clearly, with a certain biological bitterness that, immediately, made me think of one of the functions, almost the main one, of art and poetry: trying to set traps for death. Try to deceive her, distract her.

This is a secular evasion to try to fight our own destiny and make it clear. And everyone’s. Remember Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956) or the fundamental core of Espriu’s poetry. The macabre dances of popular culture or the morbid taste of Romanticism for death… and all the expensive and universal man’s obsession with the grim reaper, the genre of vanitas… Yes, art and science follow paths parallels that never touch, but they have a lot in common: the permanent enmity of life against death. Mission impossible for a foregone conclusion. And unappealable.

The initial statement brings me to what Semprún said about, when it was, his death: “What disturbs me the most is that the world continues without me”. The matter lies, but above all in our, more or less, inflamed ego. How can this whole vast universe go on without us? These questions that are often the prelude to anxiety: they hurt like the pure and bitter white of nothingness. Of the unknown that threatens us. The void and everything that is impossible to write, paint or tell. We too, men and women, are unfathomable beings inhabiting, let’s face it, now more than ever a planet and a landscape of moral atrocity, wars and cruelty. Of a duel, on the way to encasement, between serial killers. Do we need names? A thick cloud of crows hovers over us.

Already lost the exquisite happiness of being young and let the mirror, unmerciful, return to us the image of our already older father, the future rushes. Suddenly: life is serious. Consider this pessimism as an act of exorcism. The terrible in family is less terrible. apparently Yes, apparently.