View from the Majestic Hotel Restaurant, 13 October 2023

Philosopher Ramón Xirau taught me for two years from 1962 to 1963 at Mexico City College. He covered from the pre-Socratics to Sartre. I learned lots of stuff. One night a few weeks ago I could not sleep. I started to think.

I came up with this startling conclusion (at least to me) that those Greek philosophers had no books or phones. What did they do besides teach? 

They thought.

These cold rainy days in which with my two cats on top of me for most of the day I seem to do nothing except think and try (with no success) not to think on how I miss my Rosemary now gone since December 9, 2020.

Back in October, 2013 at the Zócalo Feria del Libro in Mexico City (these initials are now popular CDMX) I took my friend Laura Zamora (a friend of my oldest daughter Ale) for dinner at the Hotel Majestic that overlooks (nice view) the Zócalo which is the centre of Mexico City and where the book fair was being held.

Laura Zamora in the Majestic Hotel Lobby

It was impossible for me not to think that I frequented the outdoor veranda (now gone) with Rosemary in the early 1970s and had lovely breakfasts with a warm sun. The veranda is now covered and the restaurant is well kept and the food is very good.

The hotel is central to a book by my friend Paco Taibo II called La Sombra de la Sombra. I have 18 of his books, mostly in Spanish but it seems I read this one in English. I remember nothing of the book. In fact I have at least 4000 books, of which I have read most, yet I remember little of their contents.

Paco Taibo II at the Rosario Castellanos Bookstore

Thinking about this I have come to the conclusion that all the information of those books, all the people in my life, who are mostly dead, contributed to the person that I am now. I may not remember about The Shadow of the Shadow, but its contents are like a fertilizer you pour on a plant and the plant grows and flowers.

Because poetry is usually much shorter I can quote lots of it. I especially remember Jorge Luís Borges’s poem  La Lluvia (Rain) with that line that is impossible to translated into English:

“el curioso color del colorado”

In my thoughts I wonder if one could enter my brain and separate the fragments that represent books, visual experiences and conversations and dealings with family and other human beings.

I have concluded that I am a person that is made up of a considerable amount of experienced fragments.