<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - ideas]]> 10 <![CDATA[Why do we switch languages without realizing it?]]>

How many of you have started a conversation in Catalan and, after a short while, ended up speaking in Spanish? Perhaps the other person had answered you in Spanish but understood you perfectly. Perhaps you didn't know if they spoke Catalan. Perhaps it was someone you had just met and didn't want to make them feel uncomfortable, or perhaps, quite simply, it just came out that way.

]]> <![CDATA[Triptych landed (I): With spines]]> When I met Jaume Reus, I had deeply engraved in my third eye the intense expression of a little boy of nine or ten years old at the Viu l'Estiu camps, who refused to go to bed at Victory shouting: "I want to live! I don't want to sleep!". I wouldn't be surprised if I've already told you: he really passed on the premise to us; even to me, who has always enjoyed lazing around with a good book all morning, but counting, amidst insomnia, the hours that the body (with its essential demands) deducts from my anecdotal passage through the earth. I ponder it and the poet Jaume C. Pons Alorda appears to me, eyes wide open and ears perked to all the canteranos of all the writers in the universe, who admires and listens to "the paper moth, / the weevil of existence", while ecstatically squeaking that "the party is the suicide of the flesh, and satisfaction / is the Deicide / perpetual / of the forest / and of misery" (El corc. Labreu, 2025). I hear his keyboard echoing –euphoric, naturally self-destructive.

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