After Sant Jordi, it seems appropriate to take stock. The book world seems to be heading, in recent years, towards a celebration of cultural commerce in which a good part of the annual turnover is concentrated on a single day. It is still good news that the festival of the rose and the book continues to be so well received, and that there are so many people who still have the desire to give a book and a rose to their loved one. A few years ago, things were such that men bought the rose and women the book, but the macho undertone of this exchange has tended to dissipate (nobody wants to remember that detail). It is evident that if everyone buys a book for Sant Jordi (which also doesn't happen, let's not fool ourselves) the business can do very well, because selling two million books in one day is no small feat (but there are more than two million Catalan speakers; little desire to spend, and even less to read). But, if we look at the number of books the best-selling author can place on that day alone, we see that it will hardly reach 30,000 copies (their title does not represent even 1% of total sales); in other words: the most important thing is of no importance. All those books we call ‘best sellers’, books that adapt to popular tastes, only represent 6% of the total books sold that day. Nor should it be added that only a little more than half of the books sold are in Catalan, with percentages that tend to equalize, unfortunately, year after year. And if it's about selling popular books, we can't expect that, once certain books have become 'mass culture', these works will be the ones that stand out most for their aesthetic or literary values –or for their intellectual merit. There are still people who are surprised when they see how bad bad literature can be, and it is even admirable that high culture dedicates more effort to sinking what the market has elevated than to lifting what, being excellent, goes more or less unnoticed and doesn't bring in any money. It goes without saying that this phenomenon shows more resentment and snobbery than genuine concern for the state of culture. That Sant Jordi is a celebration of commercial or popular literature should not scare anyone, because the next day (Sant Fidel) we can continue going to bookstores and take home, without queues or crowds, the true wonders that are still being published by editors who have not turned into pimps for ideological propaganda disguised as 'for everyone' narrativity. What we know as literature, or good literature, will never die, but it will have an increasingly reduced role and place in culture, a phenomenon that each passing day moves further away from what it should be ( an exhibition and learning of possible excellence) to become a simulation of cultural or ideological integration: in the celebration of the cliché, or of that which is most sweat-soaked and predictably innocuous, of what we already know reinforced with propaganda and trinkets. 

The obsession with death that exists from certain interpretations of religious creeds and now from the so-called ultra-agenda – more or less stale conservatism – is indeed worrying and revealing. According to Christian religion, we would be told that our life does not belong to us, and therefore it is not right to want to die or end it when we sensibly wish. Life is a kind of divine gift, of which we are only custodians, like a wonderful book that is not ours and which we must return more or less intact to the Librarian Above. This may be so, or it could be, but the truth is that we have no certainty that things respond to these parameters. In the end, God does not manifest himself, but priests do. 

Men, generally speaking, care very little about feminism. Some are outright opposed, saying that women are exaggerating, or that the grievances and inequalities they claim are no longer justified in an egalitarian and democratic society, or that it's all just a charade to look good or to collect subsidies by playing the victim. Others try to understand it beyond International Women's Day and attempt to bring some sense to a set of demands that, in my opinion, make perfect sense, especially when we see the statistics on domestic and sexual violence, or the glaring economic inequalities. However, it's difficult for a man to feel directly involved in these demands. It's as if the women around us were a foreign country with its own wars, miseries, and injustices, which we can understand, but we're not expected to do more than sympathize from afar and not show ourselves to be too supportive—or complicit—with the oppressors. Even among younger generations, this issue seems to have a bad reputation, as if it were a settled debate, or as if women don't need any help or support, or as if feminism itself creates the problem by highlighting a set of inequalities that should already be invisible. There are also some women who feel more comfortable thinking of the battle as already won, or as unnecessary or awkwardly framed. Or who find the traditionally domestic role of women liberating and wonderful, a promised land lost. However, even if we were to approach the solution from a left-wing perspective, it's often unclear what kind of policies could be implemented.