On June 9, 2023, a date that still seems to be right here, Nuccio Ordine, the author of The Utility of the Useless, died, his diatribe against the banality with which contemporary haste has turned literature and thought into ignored waters.
Nuccio was 64 years old, he was appreciated throughout the world of letters as someone who came to resume the fight against ignorance and in favor of reading, and in that endeavor he seemed like a titan, someone invincible.
He traveled to America, to the capitals of Europe, to the islands of Italy, where he came from, and to any place where his energy, his passion and his joy of reading and of making a world that was descending into the darkness of the world read. ignorance.
His vitality, which seemed to be made of paper and iron, enthusiasm and books, suffered a fatal collapse.
He underwent hip surgery, died from the terrible after-effects that sometimes occur after the most innocuous interventions, and the silence that followed his unmatched ability to be present with his talent and his nobility is tremendous and hard.
During those days when evil stalked him, he sent me a message that I only heard once, as if a black cloud clouded his voice and extinguished it at that moment when he believed that, in fact, everything was going to be as his word commanded. hope.
And those of us who were in those worlds feeling that, in effect, that would be nothing.
It was a disaster.
That death left Nuccio Ordine without those who, with admiration, had followed him since The Usefulness of the Useless, as if from that book a solution emerged for the devastation that the preminence of the Internet (the worst of the Internet) has brought about in their unequal struggle to erase the classical vocation that keeps reading in suspense.
That book, published by Acantilado in Spanish in 2013 and republished in abundance since then, became a universal breviary against ignorance and made Ordine a fundamental figure in both parts of the Spanish language.
They called him from everywhere, from here and there, and he was also requested as an oracle of classical culture by European universities, some of which, in France, for example, had him as an emeritus professor and as a lecturer.
Saying Nuccio was already a common name in quotes from authors of the culture that fought against the misfortune of misreading.
I met him in 2017, in Malaga, then we traveled in search of Andalusian folklore through places that he always felt were emulators of the remote past of the Greco-Latin cultures that had their consequence and even their cradle in that Hispanic south.
That excursion was followed by others, also through Madrid, to the Canary Islands, to any place where he felt it was necessary to continue preaching the good news of good books and the great classics.
At the Palace Hotel in Madrid, next to where Jorge Luis Borges felt he could see the color yellow, the only one within reach of his eyes, Nuccio met one of his great teachers, the philosopher Emilio Lledó, with whom He spoke (about philosophy, about the validity of the Latin classics) as if Aristotle, Homer, Plato or Cavafy were listening between him and the illustrious Spanish professor.
Listening to them speak (I had the audacity to record them, and after chronicling that dialogue which were, as Lledó's teacher said, like reading suggestions) was like attending the encounter of the very idea of the happiness of having read.
One of the last times I saw him in person (the telephone conversations with Nuccio were also very abundant, with many intellectuals or journalists) was in Taormina, during a literary festival of great importance also outside of Italy.
A man of air and of the beach, he insisted on walking on the pebbles of the beach, and he strode as if, walking like this, he would at some point reach the beaches of Homer.
I then asked him what was left of that relationship between southern Italy and Europe, with the idea that Greece was the capital of the past of a humanity more concerned with culture.
For him the world was no other homeland than that journey;
The maps were not made of anything other than the consequence of writing, books, thought, and all that music had an origin that at that moment was encrypted in the most beautiful stones, sinuous, clean like the voices of poets, of Taormina.
He told me, looking at the stone:
“This, this path, and the verses of Cavafis, are the path that follows the knowledge of the Greeks.”
His enthusiasm was a journey for the joy of thinking, of traveling, of meeting others, of talking, and he prolonged it later, after his trip, stroking his jet-black dog from the solitude of Skype, as if he were narrating what he had not yet done. It was written but that he already explained as part of the dreams that literature had given him.
In person, he listened, standing very close to his interlocutor, wanting to say yes, surely, but sometimes contradicting, probably wishing that time would not run out, that the conversation, as Rafael Alberti wanted, was a dam against death.
Nuccio did not want the light of the word to ever end, which he gave by all means, in writing (he wrote every Sunday in Il Corriere della Sera, in El País, in many newspapers, wherever they asked him, in favor of the education of classical culture, literature), in conferences, on WhatsApp... My cell phone is full of your company, your enthusiasm and your ability to offer help, ideas and hugs.
Until the last moment.
Shortly before that day in June 2023 when it was learned of his death, there were several messages in which he encouraged those (like this chronicler) who were worried about the future of his health, undergoing a surgical intervention that did not seem serious. …Everything would be fine, the doctors are good, the surgeons too, and finally the cold water of the news turned into the ice of the last news, the final one, the death of Nuccio Ordine.
In that climate that is worse than absence, because it has no end and is irreversible, this last Wednesday there was an oasis in which Nuccio was heard again.
It was at the University of Comillas on the outskirts of Madrid.
Angelo Valastro, an Italian professor, the reason why the author of The Utility of the Useless was an Honoris Causa doctor from that Spanish university, organized a group of students to reread that landmark book.
It was a symphony of readings in which the words solidarity, common good, love for flowers, the usefulness of the human, curiosities, the harmful or the truth, taken from his texts throughout his best-known work, sounded in that auditorium as if he were saying them against the wall of oblivion.
I have not told anyone, as José Hierro said in his most desolate poem, that I was on the verge of crying.