I have spent a few summer hours reading Pedro Olalla, writer, Hellenist and filmmaker. His Palabras del Egeo (Cliff) is a lucid walk over the sea that bathes the scattered islands on what tens of thousands of years ago, before the rising waters, was land between present-day Greece and Turkish Anatolia that meets the Dardanelles, passes through the alleged Homeric Troy and enters the Black Sea through the Bosphorus. How much actuality can be deduced from the reflections of this scholar who has resided in Athens since 1994 and is one of the most recognized Hellenists.
The word, the sea, the stone and the landscape places them at the dawn of our civilization. The Greek and Latin classics are not only not dead but are a source of inspiration for modern literature, history and science. Infinity within a reed, by Irene Vallejo, is a fascinating journey into the world of books, words and thought since the beginning of time.
The most civilized peoples are those who have dived into the most ancestral literature with ancient and traveling words turning the language into a volatile ship of civilization. One of the main pillars of Catalan culture is the Bernat Metge collection, promoted by Francesc Cambó, in which the main Greek and Latin authors are published in the original language and in Catalan. It is a literary, philosophical and cultural gem.
Pedro Olalla explains to his son Silvano the thoughts he develops while sitting in a corner of one of the many islands in the Aegean. He speaks, of course, of climate as a changing factor since the rotation of the Earth around the Sun is not carried out on a stable axis.
And in turn he deduces that the Earth's climate changes, not only due to terrestrial factors caused by the devastating action of humans, but also due to astronomical causes and the mechanics of the universe itself.
It is a literary vision, based on geographical and historical evidence of the inevitability of change on a planet that during the first half of its existence was “a hell of gases, cataclysms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; then there were moments when it was a silent white sphere, completely or partially covered in ice”. There have been seven great ice ages and now, even if it doesn't seem like it, we are still in the last of them, as the Earth still maintains the dwindling and fragile polar ice caps. The author estimates that eighteen thousand years ago the ice from the north reached the shores of the Mediterranean.
That the predatory action of the consumerist and industrial society, swimming in abundance, has contributed decisively to the climate change that can be verified in the passage of one or two generations, is evidence. But change will occur nevertheless no matter how strict the efforts to curb the abuses of humans by mistreating nature with despicable hostility.
The chronicler of The Washington Post Ishaan Tharoor reported yesterday the worst drought that Europe has known in the last five hundred years and the alarm created by the dry rivers, the lakes that lose flow and the swamps that show the historical entrails, hanging and hidden so far under the waters. In the course of the Roman Tiber, a first-century bridge has emerged, probably built by order of Nero. In Alpine Lombardy, on the shores of Lake Como, a deer skull of around one hundred thousand years old and bone remains of lions, hyenas and rhinoceroses have appeared.
Thermal exaggerations in Europe are occurring more intensely in China and parts of Southeast Asia. But at the same time, torrential rains are being unleashed in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and, many kilometers away, also in Texas. The recent floods in Pakistan have caused more than a thousand deaths and displaced ten million people. Climate change is happening in spades.
The fact that some parts of the Rhine, Germany's great industrial river, are not navigable may be a passing phenomenon, but it shows that there are few spaces on Earth protected from a change in climate that will have unsuspected consequences. Everything possible must be done, in the medium and long term, to neutralize the harmful effects of change. But the universe follows its cosmic course and has behaved unexpectedly with the Earth since the oldest civilizations.
