Most of the characters that the media mentions and that feed the most popular forums are people through it. Now and in the days of the ‘Daily Courant’, which encyclopedias consider the first newspaper designed in this way, in 1702. . It is a very useful resource for historians. Its function is to tell, analyze, give ideas and interpret what happened while the events were happening. And something else tomorrow.
Some of the characters that feed our day – let’s add the people who have become psychics – will be deleted from bibliographies in two or three centuries. Or at least not casual conversation. I don’t know what the speaker of the parliamentary commission is; I don’t know how many he has Foreign Minister; that ridiculous mayor who stands behind what he says, not what he does; a judge or judge who makes unreasonable decisions. He is an ‘influencer’, he is a ‘youtuber’, he is a macho host, he is the only hit singer to speak out against the ‘wave of communism invading us’, etc. Forget it. It seems that as a society, we give too much importance to the insignificant, the ones who fly away and those who are destined to leave no trace in history.
No one will talk about those who became the head of the ‘trend topic’, those who nested in the ‘follower’ culture. If, as Vargas Llosa says, the first Nobel Prize winners in Literature today are extremely unlikely to have a single reader—try to look for something by Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in your bookstore—imagine the future references of many who read it every day. On the floor of Congress with the claims of Julius Caesar. Convicted by history, he was never acquitted. Forgetting is condemnation.
I went to a New Year’s concert at the National Auditorium a few days ago. Josep Vicent, a distinguished conductor with the traces of a rock star, a kind of “Star Man” of classical music, conquered the capital together with ADDA Simfònica, consisting of 76 musicians, and left “ticketless” performance pieces two days in a row. Of great writers who will continue to do so as long as Ravel, Falla, Sibelius and Shostakóvich have conductors like Altean whose work blew audiences away and whose music books will also be referenced when our cities look like dystopia. As ‘El Yoyas’ Twitter fills up, a place fills up with Ravel. In the next century—I came to the conclusion that the Alicante maestro’s orchestra carried the benches—Ravel will continue to fill the auditoriums, and ‘El Yoyas’ will suffer the same fate as Bjørnson. Poor Bjornson.
As a society, we pay attention to people who will leave nothing behind when they disappear, special names that will pass through life as a transition towards oblivion and extinction. A concert whose score has been interpreted for centuries goes back in time and is immortalized by Unamuno’s phrase “the eternal struggle not to perish”. Today has an expiration date, you don’t. So why do we turn our attention to such mediocrity? Greta Thunberg will be remembered and the fighter in the dressing gown and sports car will be forgotten. Nadal award, Roland Garros champion and Champions League will be remembered; Falla and Ravel; Even fictional characters like Mr. Usher Man, Major Tom, and Penelope, who come to life and dry without leaving the platform, the voice of Serrat, another immortal, comes from somewhere.
What kind of legacy will the opposition, which has reached the ‘trend topic’ because of the agenda or some irrelevant Government members and confused while voting? No one will remember Risto Mejide, ‘El Yoyas’, members of ‘Save Me’, three quarters of the assembly.
The strangers of today are the immortals of the future. From these we will inherit vaccines, discoveries, marvelous inventions, expeditions to Mars, novels, films, great works of art, cure for cancer; less popular names that will fill encyclopedias and baptize mathematical formulas and principles of Physics. They will have lived their lives in the radiant and long-lasting brilliance of the comet, while the insignificant ones will do so for relevant, fun, until they shatter, like meteorites.