Who knows if the worst evil we can attribute to a person—or to a city, which is still a tribe of colliding passers-by—is that of greyness. Living an intermediary existence between black and white, without any involvement in things, represents the moral defeat of the pusillanimous. Subsuming the art of politics to the discreet management of daily life, as happens today in the narcotized Catalonia of the PSC, entails the death of the citizen, thrown into boredom. "There is no comrade who is not immersed in the inter-lights of their situation, surrounded by several close people and innumerable distant ones with their own fields of half-lights." This is how moralistic Peter Sloterdijk has become, whom we can now read again in Catalan (in an immaculate translation by Amadeu Viana) thanks to the titanic work of the Arcadia editors; the cover of Pensar el gris, oh surprise, is also grey.
Before equating greyness with moral misery and boredom, says the Karlsruhe thinker, philosophy had set out to understand the mystery hidden in the confluence of the grey condition. First it was Plato (note the beautiful phrase; "what the slaves in the cave of perception have before them is a world dominated by matter, where only a remnant of color clings, a residue of grayish light that stops at the edge of total loss of light, about to sink into pure blackness"), then there is also my dear Hegel (let's quote again; "grey is the color of mediation, what provides the world with a result that resists the struggle of extremes"). This beautiful zone of intermediates that seems an absolute non-place decays, some time later, when color is associated with the most totalitarian impulse; "the formal development of the State in Europe since the 17th century should be explained as the prolonged history of a greying."
But not everything is bad in the grayness. Cézanne, the author reminds us, used to say that a painter is not competent until he portrays the color gray; who knows if the genius of Aix-en-Provence would have greatly enjoyed painting cities like those of today which, despite the cloying presence of light, are still accumulations of shades that lean towards gray. Despite the multicolored pretension imposed by the kitsch modernists nostrat, Barcelona is also a city of gray tones. Many fellow citizens are fed up with the gray of some dictatorially Soviet buildings, such as the Treasury delegations or the horrifying hard plazas and other similar miseries. I speak more of the delicious dirty grayness of Barcelona's panot flor by our great Puig i Cadafalch, of the light gray color into which the travertine marble of the German Pavilion has mutated, and even the indifferent and vulgar gray of Picasso's sgraffiti that crown the COAC.
Sloterdijk, if I may be allowed the awful joke, sees everything a little blacker and says that our gray existence resides in general indifference to the outside world, a tedious life that we save through false freedoms (as we will see now that Christmas is coming, constrained by the calendarization of consumption) that resemble Chinese restaurant menus. I would say that our thinker, now that he is reaching old age and perhaps due to the cultural-economic drought of his country, has become mystical-sermonizing: "There is no self that does not face the choice of dissolving into the drift of circumstances ---gray of resignation--- or of withdrawing into active moderation ---gray of modesty in the service of great events---". Now that we are all half-depressed, it is somewhat easy to fall into pessimistic temptation; but I would say that, at the end of the road, Sloterdijk entrusts us to reconcile with the power of a benign gray in ambivalence.
Let us reconcile, then, with the grayest city. Let us visit the dreadful end of Via Laietana, just before it spills into Barceloneta, let us notice the discomfort with which the headquarters of the DHUB of the MBM group in Glòries surprises us, or even let us try to find something beautiful in the frieze of the Novíssim Building of the City Council, a work by the bore Subirats. We will be surprised to find there some form of peace and even hope within the half-lights.