Not ten years ago, although today it seems to me something that happened in another geological era, I proposed a life on horseback between Caracas and Bogotá.
Just an hour and forty flight away, sometimes much less time, with hobbies and friends in both cities and without wanting to avoid the charms of either of the two hobbies, I soon went on a “bi-capital” swing, thinking that I could sustain it forever. I didn’t doubt it because if I’m anything, it’s from Caracas and Bogotá, on the other hand, caught on in me already in the 90s of the last century.
Successive catastrophes decomposed that naive mockery of the madurista tyranny. Not all of them were political; they also happen in private life flash floods and mudslides. The truth is that very soon the comings and goings had to be suddenly suspended: one night I went to bed as a volunteer expatriate in Bogotá; in the morning he was already an exile.
I now impart news of the place where I write this note: the beautiful house that belonged to the Bogotá painter Ricardo Gómez Campuzano, where today there is a reading room of the “Luis Ángel Arango” Library, in the north of the city.
It is a family house with two floors converted into a functional library. Although central, the atmosphere of the house and its small garden is that of a suburban retreat that attracts scholars of all ages.
I was forced to leave behind a modest personal library in Caracas. In exchange, I gained citizen access to one of the best in Latin America and I will never stop thanking my happiness.
Whatever they are worth, from now on I will file my columns in a file called “Calle 80, #8-66″. I hope with this devotion to assure the beneficent influence that, in the course of several days, reading a singular book here has had on my mind. Call it, with Frazer, “empathic magic”; I am Latin American and I believe in those pods.
The book is called “Spinoza in Mexico Park” and its author is the historian Enrique Krauze, genuine mensch Mexican, the Spinozist from Amsterdam Avenue.
I had forgotten the joy that comes from entering a book that from its first pages imbues you with unexpected novelties, true revelations and invites you, on the other hand, to underline everything that reading corroborates: intuitions that you kept “without believing or stopping believing.” believe” in them, without even daring to share them.
Oh, and note on stickers post it the readings that, right now, entering the seventh decade, I have left to do and what I will do. what is it about Spinoza in Mexico Park?
It’s about the intellectual biography of Enrique Krauze who just turned 75 yesterday, so you’re very early because the game isn’t over yet and you have a lot left innings to throw. Ford Madox Ford argues that a good biography should read like a good novel: absently, nodding at all the surprises that time delivers, that “fire in which we burn What does the poet Delmore Schwartz talk about?
Parque México, second half of the last century, exterior, day: Saúl Krauze, Enrique’s grandfather, preaches “the gospel according to Spinoza” among his friends. Enrique evokes the most numinous of the conversations with his grandfather and with this he launches a book that takes the form of a transcontinental conversation, begun long before the pandemic, with his Spanish friend José María Lassalle.
The profile of Saúl, the chronicle of his Polish origins, the account of his militancy in the Bund (a party of secularized Russian Jews, also of the Poles), of his arrival in Mexico in the time of Plutarco Elías Calles, his disenchantment with the Stalin’s crimes and his lifelong humanistic fervor for Baruch Spinoza, his lonely intellectual independence and his ethic of reason and tolerance, show how vast Krauze’s scholarship is in the infinity of Jewish traditions, and, within them, that of “the non-Jewish Jews”, as Isaac Deutscher mentioned them.
At some point in a 700-page conversation, Lassalle asks if Krauze hadn’t once proposed a book about them, in the manner of Menéndez Pelayo’s Spanish heterodox. The prefiguration, aloud, of such a book, is the shaft of Spinoza in Mexico Park, which makes it a radiant history of the idea of freedom, whose protagonists are, among others, Heine, Kafka, Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Arendt, Berlin.
About Spinoza, the mysterious and the most admirable of the heterodox, I was ignorant of everything three weeks ago, except for what little I read years ago about the “geometry of the passions” in a helpful breviary written by Sir Roger Scruton. He also remembered, yes, a Spinozian breakfast, more geometric, with Jorge Luis Borges that Krauze collected in his book Liberal Journey.
From now on, I know, the stickers I was talking about above will guide my blog of Spinoza readings on 80th Street. In the meantime, I bring here what the historian, remembering his grandfather, expresses about Spinoza:
“Established in reason, and alone in reason, he serenely moved away from orthodoxy, from the tribe, from exclusive and exclusive identity, and deifying nature, he alone colonized (so to speak) the territory of free and tolerant reason. . I like to imagine my grandfather, very young, sitting in the Warsaw public library that he frequented, reading the Ethics, feeling one with nature, owner of his reason, freed from passions and fanaticism.[…]I like to think that Don Saúl chose the right hero.”
We are living today throughout the world the rise of tyrannies, those of the barbaric right and those of the identitarian left and wokist. Every day it becomes more tortuous to think about freedom.
I will follow Don Saúl: the time demands it.
#Spinoza