‘A human scale’, by Carlos Marín-Blázquez

Open this book –previously edited by Monocle, as usual – is already an enjoyment. The dedication, the prologue of Higinio Marin (“Of fable”) that gives the essential keys to reading, the beginning of the first chapter, whose title coincides with that of the book…

Precisely the first chapter is a declaration of intentions. Another time is evoked in it, a time “in which the world rose before the gaze of man invested with softer contours.” It is the time when “no one had heard of progress” and “we lived to persevere, not to change.” The reader immediately understands that we are not talking about a specific historical moment, caught between two specific dates, but rather that a historical time different from the current one is being literary evoked – that of tradition – which is at the same time an internal time, and in many cases coinciding with characteristics attributed to childhood.

In a semi-hidden way, childhood is one of the great protagonists of the book. One’s own childhood remembered from adult life, the contemplated childhood of one’s children, childhood as a state of the soul. Another key word to understand the book is paternity. Longing, nostalgia, proposal, hope: fatherhood is expressed in all possible ways throughout the pages of the work.

There are in the book a series of resounding statements, lucid diagnoses, a brave denunciation of “what is wrong in the world”, in the words of the great Chesterton. Beneath them, like an underground stream –«a hidden life »– flows the great river of images that support them, that invigorate them, of which I have been able to apprehend some. As Higinio Marín says in his admirable prologue, “reality coinciding with itself – that is, what is really real – produces in us the effect of the unreal.” There are two meanings in truth, and one of them seems unreal to us, due to its fullness.

The articles presented here are, of course, very different, since the author already showed his virtuosity in different registers, in the book of stories that preceded this one (The balance of things). In some (particularly those collected in the central part of the book, “Combat”), the denunciation flashes, so many are the scourges that plague us, in this “time that is running out”! In others (those in the first part, “Reflection”, but even more profoundly those in the last, “Intimacy”), everyday beauty shines, what is remembered, what is read, what is longed for, what is lived.

But this difference in form cannot hide the great unity of the substance: at the end of the reading, the hard-working reader – since we cannot hide that reading requires “that there is a subject”, which would say San Ignacio: these are not words written to entertain or distract – you will obtain the best of rewards: the finished treasure map, “the careful safekeeping of everything valuable.”

In the epilogue (“A True Story”) he speaks Carlos Marín-Blázquez, with echoes of great emotion, of the vocation of each one, of the true fulfillment of a life, which always passes through stripping, through the acceptance of the limit, the apparent end, the tear. In the question he asks himself, out of gratitude, for the hypothetical survival in his endeavor if the circumstances had been different, he gives us perhaps the best summary of the book and his task as a writer: “raise a wall of words against lies and the absurdity that prevails in this time that we have had to live and (…) receive in return the encouragement of a handful of people who welcome what one writes with a gesture of almost fraternal gratitude and generosity.

I hope this handful of people expands, because this book helps – again and again, each chapter like a different wave and sister to the others, breaking on the same beach – to return to the essentials of one’s life, to try to live with greater fullness and depth.