May 8, 2020

‘Men are deceived in the recognition of what is obvious’

‘Many do not understand such things as they encounter [...], but they think they do’

Heraclitus (DK 10 and 17)

Dear colleagues and friends around the world,

First and foremost, either Montesquieu’s triangles were wrong or the gods also dance.

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In the fragments I just cited, Heraclitus is referring to these types of riddles about divinity in things. First, they refer to Homer, the hypothetical author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Homer’s long shadow reduces any speech, any song that does not somehow echo his verses to mere chatter. The ancient founders of our culture encrypted the meaning of what they said through references to Homer, the wisest of men. Thus, on the one hand we have Homer, sitting quietly; on the other, a group of boys killing lice, perhaps each other’s. The boys approach Homer and ask him a riddle:

‘What we see and catch we leave behind; what we neither see nor catch we carry away.’

Legend has it that Homer could not solve the riddle. According to another legend, he was so upset at his failure to solve it that he died. Without offering the details – because Heraclitus’ book survives only in fragments – both fragments allude to this exact story. Even the wisest amongst us is deceived, not by highly obscure and difficult things, but by the most obvious, the ones we run into every day.

I have personally received very kind words for writing open letters like this one, an adjectival task that I view as part of my main job, which is to run the university. I would like to use this last letter to offer my thanks. We have our work cut out for us with the loosening of the lockdown measures and the future adjustments that may need to be made. But we are beginning to return from a whole season of perplexity and great inner struggle.

On a very different note, I want to offer my condolences to those of you who have lost a loved one. My heart goes out to everyone who has suffered. The lesson of this ‘tragic spirit’, as it is often called, is that, because we know for sure that all life ends, we must embrace life.

I have written letters to colleagues and to current and past students, who are numerous and quite diverse, based on the notion that not only does the university not end in their current inner life, but it does not even start there. The pain of this time distracts us from the meaning of UPF. A good university begins outside its routines; it begins in the academic and social commitment to the whole world – including the local world, of course – and, at the same time, with the ingenuity or talent that it seeks. It ends outside as well, with the results it can offer to the group members, to the city, the country and the world.

I suspect that what I am saying is easier to preach than to practice. The lofty feeling of belonging leads us to narrow our focus to ourselves. We have a slightly pompous, exclusive and peculiar ‘we’, with debatable rights that we need as a reference. But real work requires us to think about the world, about ‘others’, more than ‘ourselves’. If I am not mistaken, most students today want the best training, tailored to their needs and with all possible facilities; after, they will be happy to have obtained it at a great university. All this must be combined with education and fair play. Like any tragedy, it is not easy to accept.

In my view, these are the limits of universities – they are and are not there. We have all heard people say that universities must live up to their name. The allure and value of culture and science is precisely the fact that they are universal, for everyone, that they have no limits. Were they to be restricted, to get tangled up in limits, they would become worthless, just as they would if they were not recognized.

I once thought of it as my duty, and now it is my desire, to help show that UPF has no limits, but that it nevertheless acknowledges some. It is quite clear to me that the more UPF is able to understand itself from the outside, to truly see itself from the outside before deciding that it already knows what it is, the better it will be and the safer for the members of the community in which it provides its service. I think that is exactly what the fragments at the start of this letter mean.

This is the final instalment of these letters, written out of great affection to our ‘dear Pompeus’ and to the friends from all over who have taken the time to read them and whom I wholeheartedly invite to UPF, to think about what we could do for each other. To those from our own community – students, colleagues, staff, alumni – I am infinitely grateful for the remarkable and admirable work you are doing to keep UPF active and on track to achieve continuous goals for improvement. To the rest, and to quote the traditional poem by Ferran Agulló that schoolchildren learn, I would say: ‘when the swallow leaves in autumn, I do not say goodbye, but until next time’.

But first, I would like to make a final brief trip to Madagascar. The Malagasy people and their language have a wealth of proverbs, and they are very tricky to translate. One of them goes, roughly: ‘If you like a pair of shoes, be ready to wear another one.’ Like many African proverbs, it contains a complicated lesson, which is hazy and needs to be puzzled out. It is a riddle that, in Malagasy, sounds like a musical refrain. 

Jaume Casals