Nuccio Ordine wrote his gratitude speech for being awarded by the Princess of Asturias Foundation. For his work as a philosopher and intellectual heir to his great teachers such as George Steiner, Emilio Lledó and Umberto Eco.
He died unexpectedly last June 10, and it was impossible for what he wrote in gratitude to exist in any other way after his death. In the afternoon, before the winners enjoy the fanfare that accompanies these awards, Nuccio’s Italian and Spanish writings resonated with the Oviedo events like his joy after his death.
It was his telling of his own experiences in American schools in a way that reminded him of the poverty of his early years, while confirming that the teacher is the central part of teaching in all the precarious areas of a world where education is increasingly disparaged. A boy studying in his native Calabria, where he lives in a village Diamond, without bookstores or libraries.
An intellectual who frequently appeared in the press, classrooms and conference rooms in the last years of his life, he said that neoliberalism was destroying the future of education and “seriously endangering the role and future of public education.” His great appreciation of the teacher Albert Camus led him to bring a letter written by the author to the Oviedo lecture. Abroad sent him to this The humble teacher who was much loved by his “grateful students”.
You are passionate fight against inequality The center of his speech would be filled with literary allusions and embraces of a future he expected to be better and which he could no longer confirm was sadder than the one he was experiencing.
It was the last thing he wrote before time came upon him like a violent storm: “Oscar Wilde was right when he wrote: ‘A map of the world that does not include the land of Utopia is not even worth looking at.’ ”.
This text, some pages still unfinished, circulated in the prize hotel and in the Campoamor, the theater whose echo echoes year after year. In a corner of the hotel room where old friends had previously gathered each year for the Princess of Asturias awards, at noon there were two women embracing a great absence from the awards of this calling.
These were Rosalía and Nuccio Ordine’s widow and sister María. The winner of the Social Sciences award, who died shortly after experiencing the joy of this privilege, was trying to write his speech. It circulated as a letter after his death, never to be expanded or corrected..
The widow and the sister, invited by the Foundation of the Princess of Asturias to this tribute and farewell commemoration, have spent here days of mourning but also of joy since the author of this book. the benefit of the useless left something in this country unusual footprint for a foreign writer
Just as Juan Cueto, Spain’s most important modern intellectual of the last half century and whose cultural significance is essential to understanding these awards, did much of his work as the reinventor of modern television in Italy, Ordine is here too. What he wrote, what he said at numerous conferences and an Italian whom no one knows for what he has published since his first masterpiece was published here (always in Acantilado). The benefit of the useless.
The widow and her sister, a bookseller, came to greet with their presence the love of the Spaniards for Nuccio; Nuccio is paid tribute not only by the foundation that awarded him, but also by Acantilado. Text before his interview with his teacher George Steiner (George Steiner, disturbed guest) It appears in Spanish bookstores with the following preface: now it looks like it was written for him tooif the names of the writer Ordine and the interviewee Steiner are reversed.
You shudder to read this foreword from the author, hours before his name was announced as the winner at the Campoamor Theatre. Classics for life. It begins: “Even two years after his disappearance, Steiner remains present in my life and in the lives of many readers who loved him. It is an invisible presence, a hidden shadow that silently accompanies us in the museum, in the library, in school or university classrooms, at a classical music concert or in one of the cafes where George noticed the most important aspects of ‘innovation’. ‘The idea of Europe’.
That Nuccio, a few months ago, just before his death, The Spanish unexpectedly captured their legion of followers He celebrated his success at the Asturias prizes as a confirmation of his zest for philosophy: he is now a great authority of the past, like Steiner, but a thinker of the future today.
One of his admirers, Pedro Miguel Echenique, scholar and universal Basque, told us before Nuccio was among the winners that this Italian, born in a modest region, in the town of Diamante de Calabria, shared the same thing with Steiner. Philosopher He is “one who reads a book with a pen in his hand” and shared with his teachers “the sublime benefit of useless science in which he applied his passion for knowledge.”
The Basque professor said: “He is one of the few people who deals with literature and understands science well.. Therefore, like Aldous Huxley, he understood that literature and science should progress together by expanding the boundaries of knowledge.
The physicist, who was also deemed worthy of Ordine’s posthumous award in the past, added that Nuccio “expanded the conceptual structure of modern science until it became collective art.” In short it was something A moral diamond, an unforgettable intellectual”.
That son of Diamante became one of the bastions of science and philosophy that Acantilado published. The publishing house’s director, Sandra Ollo, told this journalist to summarize the profile of the legacy of the winner, who was dramatically absent shortly before he turned 65: “First of all, what is memorable about Nuccio is her joy, vitality and desire. The fervor that causes him to defend his ideas tirelessly.” Nuccio Ordine’s absence from Cueto’s territory yesterday to be applauded for his intelligence seemed like a usurpation of a life.