22 Beautiful Passages of Gray and Jewish Tradition to Learn in Uncertain Times

About the author Alejandro Gandara (Santander, 1957), collected these texts from semi-doctrinal domestications to help explain what might also be interesting about them: more than the strict notion of happiness, today so distorted by successful discussions of self-help, the question of the good lifehow we fare on this short journey of death to death in search of goodness and beautythey are also destined to be tormented by evil and violence.

So awkward moments Griegas poetry and tragedy (Sapho, Esquilo, Sophocles), de on philosophy (Plato, Epicurus) or of Antiguo (Genesis, Job) y del New Testament (the parable of the mines) are widely quoted in these pages to illuminate their experiences and agonies, their disputes and dialogues about love and right, satisfaction and guilt, enseñanzas de valor about what distinguishes the lives of mortals and allows them to create a certain sense of uncertainty in their actions.

Gándara, previously awarded the Nadal Prizes and the Herralde de Novela y Anagrama de Ensayo, returns here to show his good works as a man of letters and an essayist who treats these classic texts. with enough erudition and knowledge to make your comments rigorous without sacrificing a nimble and relaxed tonewhich effectually approximates this sum of wisdom concerning moral excellence.

Life is always a dangerous navigation between certainties and deciphering, says Gándara. Raising the specific category of formulas that cover these texts, in order to fix them in a one-sided, limiting, “catequizándolos” reading, requires giving up what you really want to express above the totality of the world. I feel in them anger, pain, misunderstanding, pride, passion and protest against the calamities of existence.

Gándara demonstrates her good writing duties in this compendium of wisdom on moral excellence

Oedipus I don’t want to know who he is and why he is resorting to the inquisition of others. Antigone if he resists treading on his familiar foot, and therefore rebels against the decree which forbids the burial of his brother’s corpse, while Creon he seems unable to reconcile his loyalty to the city’s laws with the ancestral precepts of the heart, the juzgándola with an equally inflexible sensibility. As part of your signed acceptance, Work he seems to condemn them to a God who allows evil.

But in all these combinations, there is much more unconditional attachment to any of these characters, and each of them embodies separately. Gándara opens up the interpretation of these classical passages with the polyphony of his voices by the end of the escuchar, thanks to its dissonances and conflicts, a calmer air, even melancholic, that invites us to come to terms with what is finite in life.

What can also be explained in such a great way is that the sense of these ethical orientations tends to be revealed sometimes in terms often considered maverick. A large part of modern literature and thought, through its experience with a more desensitized world, has been able to show us how existing problems can no longer be treated only as individual problems, in the midst of which today nothing escapes the control of biopolitics. In any case, to suggest a comparison in this respect would not be a bad excuse for Gándara to take such pleasure in the second volume of these texts.