Goodbye to Savater

Fernando Savater and I have always been out of adjustment.

Today, when it is difficult to pay attention to him without a little blush, I recognize what I denied him three decades ago: that he has been one of the best essayists this country has had in the last forty years.

He was fine, brilliant, prismatic, cultured, irreverent, funny: a robust Chestertonian who liked English breakfasts and horse racing, rather libertarian at first, later unbribably social democratic.

I was serious and upright: that is, simple.

In 1985 and 1988, I published two Marxist pamphlets with Carlos Fernández Liria:

Stop thinking

and

Think again

.

On the cover of the latter, through a photomontage, we had made Savater sit on the lap of a Romanesque virgin holding a rose in her hand, in a clear allusion to his socialist militancy at that time.

His response was not angry and offended.

On the contrary.

In an article in EL PAÍS he mocked us in the most implacable, blasé and scathing way.

I still laugh today.

“Santiago Alba Rico and Carlos Fernández Liria,” he wrote, “are like the little shepherds of Bethlehem: they think and think and think again.”

Shortly after,

La Luna

magazine raised a debate between the three.

The beating he gave us was Homeric.

What was the difference?

Not only did he hold more sensible political positions than ours: he was smarter, wiser and funnier than us.

When you are young you often think about what you would like to be when you grow up;

Then, when you are older, you think back to what you would have liked to be when you were young.

I never wanted to be Fernando Savater at a time when I was twenty-five years old and Savater, at forty, was politically sensible and intellectually brilliant;

Now that I'm sixty-three, I wish I'd been a little smarter in my youth.

I think that the person I am now would have agreed on many things (except for being close to Felipe González's PSOE) with the Savater of thirty years ago.

But we won't be able to meet anymore.

I have changed to get a little closer—with less talent and ingenuity—to what he was when he wrote

The Hero's Task

,

Recovered Childhood

or

Ethics for Amador

.

He has changed to look like Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Giorgia Meloni.

Someone may say that these displacements only have geological value and that they limit themselves to anticipating a similar drift: that I am condemned, in short, to end up as he has ended up.

I don't rule out anything.

I don't rule out being a fan in fifteen years.

But the question is another.

The point is knowing when you are right;

which of the two Savater was right.

Without a doubt he was smarter, nicer, brighter, more ingenious than the deceased that he wrote in EL PAÍS against the follies of the serious and the upright.

But it turns out that that one was also much more reasonable.

We can change many times throughout our lives and feel, from inside our bodies, that each of those changes is justified;

We can even justify them all in a self-evident and more or less convincing way: when thought falters, intelligence sometimes remains intact, that dangerous faculty that serves above all to convince oneself that one's life and one's own evolution, of the which we are hardly owners, always have a premeditated and exemplary character.

Now, an intelligence without thought ends up devoured by old age and narcissism: it becomes serious and upright: it ends up, so to speak, losing its mind.

Some find the reason early and keep it until death: think, I don't know, of the brilliant and irritating Goethe, who was always clever and wise between 1749 and 1832. Others go through the world without even touching it.

And many others stumble upon it at some point in its life and do not know how to preserve it.

It is as difficult to find it as it is to retain it.

I'm not ruling anything out, I said.

I don't rule out becoming a fan in fifteen years.

But it is now that, at least at times, I am right;

and it was thirty years ago when Fernando Savater, many times, had it.

Changes only change us and that is why, just in case, I regret now, without waiting any longer, the old man I will be.

Let us say goodbye to Savater with tenderness and melancholy.

He can happen to all of us.

The important thing is that there continues to be an approximately stable number of reasonable people in the world, although we are not yet reasonable or have stopped being reasonable;

The important thing is that there are more reasonable people every day and not fewer and that a reasonable majority democratically stops those who are not reasonable and takes care of managing the newspapers, the State budgets, the armies and the institutions.

Let's tell the truth: we are not going down that path.

Savater's defeat is disheartening.

If Savater has lost his way, how can Milei, Trump, Ayuso, Le Pen, Meloni, Netanyahu, and all their millions of voters not lose it?

Santiago Alba Rico

is a writer and philosopher.

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