CULTURE

From its first pages, El camino a casa (Selvi Ediciones, 2020), by Caridad Atencio, we are presented with a search for confirmation. It is not the random journey, the improvisation that confuses itself, seeking constant amazement at world events, it is fluctuating between present and past, cultural weight and continuing to experience day to day until finding more moderate territories or , perhaps, with other incentives.

In the Bible, the number seven has a special value. It is usually associated with the idea of fullness, perfection, completeness, completeness … and therefore, closely linked to the theological sphere and to the vision of divine nature. In the present text, this sense is displayed in the reading of the poem “The sterile seed”, by José Zacarías Tallet.

By writing Lyrical Diary (Selvi Ediciones, 2020), Roberto Manzano discovers his desire to share a spiritual thought about the world. However, the generalization leads us to want to know the privacy of the author. In fact, would it be convenient to define a world that, beyond spatial-temporal experiences, represents a reality expanded by imagination and dreams from the poet’s experience? Why does Manzano write this diary?

Jerome, also known as Vikar, is a twenty-something architecture student obsessed with movies and with serious problems to socially relate to reality beyond the cinema. In the film “Zeroville”, James Franco returns to direct himself, and he succeeds so effectively that someone else seems to have the last word.

The interlocutor in Minari is both the Korean family that wants to placate itself in American soil and culture and the characters (people, climate, landscape…) with which he interacts in a story about family survival and cultural identity.

With six Oscar nominations, “The Father”, (Florian Zeller, 2020), win in the section that is or leaves without any prize of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it will remain one of those unforgettable dramas, however hard and beautiful, where existential twilight is accompanied with great desire by love. With excellent performances, the film insists on the necessary presence of the children or one of them in the house, as a consolation for parents who have already aged. It is then worth thinking of the elders who are isolated or abandoned by their nearest beings. According to Pope Francis, this gesture, in addition to mutilating and impoverishing the family, “deprives young people of that necessary contact with their roots and with a wisdom that youth alone cannot attain”.

About two hundred years after the birth of the French writer Charles Pierre Baudelaire, the following text brings us closer to a part of his work: art criticism, which, in the author’s opinion, “was reasonable and passionate as the life of the poet and essayist.”

Film art has expressed, although referring to past and present realities, the pain that is in the air and that is breathed. Thus they reach the nominations of the 2021 Oscars films that echo the pain from a variety of performances that allude to uncomfortable subjects, open, bleeding wounds, of the societies in which we live. As hard as those films are (and they are) must be seen. To remember, or to learn.

In the most recent printed issue of Palabra Nueva, the Catholic intellectual Dr. Roberto Méndez reviews the months lived in total lockdown during the year 2020 and identifies this time as a test of patience, sanity and humility. When 2021 advances amid great uncertainty, the poet and essayist recapitulates past life and takes advantage of being, like St Augustine, a millimeter closer in the search for transcendence.