When I burst into Sarrià square, I am immediately struck by the contrast between its very fine urban seams (mental note for noucentista nostalgics like me; before the annexation of the neighborhood to Barcelona in 1921, this place was called Prat de la Riba square) and a crowd of cayetanos in supposedly international school uniforms speaking Castilian with their hair slicked back with brilliantine. Soon I come across the majestically Nordic vision of the Sarrià-JV Foix Library, a work by OP Team Arquitectes, an infrastructure that the neighborhood's fellow citizens had been demanding since Olympic times and which now stands dressed in algues, or i escata like a first-world facility. Yours truly is a library rat ---specifically, that of the Ateneu Barcelonès--- and I would say there are few things that make me happier than getting lost among books and peering into the rich anthropology that these caves of knowledge include.
Since its inauguration (preceded by controversy over the name of the infrastructure, because in this country of ours there can be no sarao or pyramid without its consequent uproar… and it turns out that Sarrià's most universal poet was born with a penis between his legs, what can we do) the Foix library has asserted itself as one of the first centers dedicated to digital culture, with its room for practicing gaming with virtual glasses included. The temptation for those nostalgic for wooden libraries with oceans of old volumes could lead us to rashly dismiss this new modern vision of libraries, but the avant-garde technologist of the moment will pull out Wikipedia and immediately quote the most famous verse of the poet in question: "M'exalta el nou i m'enamora el vell". For all this, I dropped into the place, with the will not to remain anchored in nostalgia and the futile desire to travel towards the virtual present.
Certainly, it is difficult to remain indifferent to a display of object beauty like that of the Foix library, filled with some very cute greenish sofas, ideal for a pajama and potty nap, and a series of isolated capsule-shaped cubicles, I would say better designed for initiating oneself into the art of tantric sex than for reading Heidegger. I'm not kidding; for reading, it is essential to surround oneself with beautiful objects and, if the arrangement helps us reach the page, endavant les atxes! But it is symptomatic that a library like the Foix seems to dedicate only 30% of its space to books, that it reserves a very uninspired shelf for its protagonist and the avant-garde movement and, finally, that the presence of Catalan in most volumes is alarmingly minority. If this is the vision of books, of reading and ---in turn--- of the Catalan language that our authorities are offering us, may providence help us.
Regarding Catalan, my spies tell me that there is no established percentage for the acquisition of volumes in our language for public facilities; the country's librarians try to adapt the offer to demand, which (due to the scarcity of many genres in Catalan) ends up causing 60% of the available texts to be in Spanish. All this is understandable, but the reader will understand that having the minoritized language within a library named after one of our best poets is a kick in the picarols of the soul that is difficult to assume. This is especially painful in sections like the children's, where Catalonia is experiencing a truly splendid moment of illustrated books in Catalan that I do not see translated in the children's rooms, where South American nannies recite stories to children while waiting for those mothers who work long hours and vote for Sílvia Orriols.
To console myself for this diglossic slap and the general panorama of this library without books, I make one last nostalgic gesture and head to the philosophy section. This is not my lucky afternoon; my discipline, with more than two millennia of joyful existence, makes up a couple of meager shelves of few volumes (I insist, some in Spanish, when Catalan translation is available!), right next to topics as exciting as "Occultism. Paranormal Phenomena" and "Psychology. Emotions". Equating Plato with Cuarto Milenio has left me completely stunned. To face desperate situations, urgent measures are needed, and that is how I leave this new temple of modernity praying to Saint Benedict of Nursia for interlibrary loan to bring books closer to all Barcelona users who seek them and also for, among the jungle of design, someone to end up encountering the grace of a text.
Only the sordid sugar of Catalan identity can cure this. Crossing the square, I rush to Can Foix and order three fritters and a coffee. I'm getting old, I must admit.