PRINCESS OF ASTURIAS AWARDS | Nuccio Ordine in the heart of the air by Juan Cueto

Nuccio Ordine had written his speech of gratitude for having been awarded by the Princess of Asturias Foundation for his work as a philosopher and intellectual heir to his great teachers, such as George Steiner, Emilio Lledó and Umberto Eco.

unexpectedly died last June 10 and it was already impossible for what he wrote as gratitude to exist in any other way than posthumously. In the middle of the afternoon, before the winners enjoyed the fanfare that accompanies these awards, Nuccio’s writing, in Italian, in Spanish, resonated in the events of Oviedo like his posthumous joy.

It was a vindication of the teacher as the main part of teaching, in all the risky areas of a world increasingly thrown into contempt for education, while explaining his own experiences in American schools that reminded him of the poverty of his first years. years as a child studying in Calabria, his homeland, where he lived in a village, Diamond, without bookstores or libraries.

Neoliberalism, he said in the last years of his life as a frequent intellectual in the press and in classrooms and conference rooms, is destroying the future of education, “seriously endangering the role and future of public education.” . His enormous appreciation for the teacher Albert Camus led him to bring to the Oviedo speech the letter that the author of Abroad sent him to that humble professor so loved by “his grateful students”.

Your passionate fight against inequality It was going to be the center of his speech, full of literary references and embraces of a future that he expected to be better and that now he can no longer verify is even sadder than the one he himself experienced.

This was the last thing he wrote before time came upon him like a fierce storm: “Oscar Wilde was right when he wrote: ‘A map of the world that does not contain the country of Utopia is not even worth taking a look at. ‘”.

That text, some pages still incomplete, circulated through the awards hotel and through the Campoamor, the theater from which its echo comes annually. Before, in a corner of the hotel room, where there were old friends who gather here every year for the Princess of Asturias awards, there were two women at noon who embrace a major absence from the awards of this call.

They were Rosalía and María, the widow and sister of Nuccio Ordine. He winner of the Communication and Humanities Awardwho died shortly after receiving the joy of that distinction, had worked on writing his speech, which It circulated as a posthumous letter that will never have its expansion or corrections..

The widow and sister, invited by the Princess of Asturias Foundation to this tribute that is one of recognition and farewell, have spent days of mourning here but also of joy, since the author of The usefulness of the useless has left in this country a unusual footprint for a foreign author.

Just like Juan Cueto, the most important modern intellectual that Spain has had in the last half century, and who is essential to understand the cultural significance that these awards maintain, did much of his work in Italy as a reinventor of modern television, Ordine here is an Italian that no one knows, for what he has written, for what he has said in numerous conferences, and for what he has published (always in Acantilado) since his first masterpiece came out here, The usefulness of the useless.

The widow, who is a bookseller, and the sister came to greet with their presence that Spanish affection for Nuccio, to whom not only the foundation that awarded him but also Acantilado itself also pays tribute. A text that precedes an interview he did with his teacher George Steiner (George Steiner, the uncomfortable guest) appears in Spanish bookstores with a prologue that now it also seems written for himselfif the names of an author, Ordine, and the interviewee, Steiner, are reversed.

It gives you chills, hours before his name is announced as a winner at the Campoamor Theater, to read this prologue by the author of Classics for life. This is how it begins: “Two years after his disappearance, Steiner continues to be present in my life and in the lives of many readers who loved him. It is an invisible presence, a discreet shadow that silently accompanies us in the museum, in the library, in the school or university classroom, at the classical music concert or in one of those cafes in which George recognized the most significant aspects of ‘the idea of ​​Europe’.

That Nuccio who a few months ago, just before his death, unexpectedly caught his Spanish legion of followers He celebrated his success in the Asturias awards as a confirmation of his joie de vivre for philosophy. He is now, like Steiner, a major authority of the past, but a thinker for the future of the present.

An admirer of his, Pedro Miguel Echenique, a scientist and universal Basque, told us, before Nuccio was among the winners, that this Italian who was born in a humble region, in the town of Diamante de Calabria, who shared with Steiner that a philosopher He is “he who reads a book with a pencil in his hand,” he shared with his teachers “the sublime usefulness of useless science to which he applied the passion for knowledge.”

It was, said the Basque professor, “one of the few who practiced letters who also understood science well. He understood, therefore, like Aldous Huxley, that letters and sciences must advance together, expanding the frontiers of knowledge.

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The physicist, who has also been awarded in the past with the award that Ordine now receives posthumously, added that Nuccio has expanded “the conceptual edifice of modern science until it becomes collective art. He was, in short, a moral diamond, an unforgettable intellectual”.

That son of Diamante has been one of the bastions of science and philosophy published by Acantilado. Sandra Ollo, director of the publishing house, told this journalist, to summarize the profile of the legacy of the winner who was dramatically absent shortly before turning 65: “Above all, what is unforgettable about Nuccio is his joy, his vitality and his desire. The vehemence that made him tirelessly defend his ideas. It seemed like a usurpation of life that Nuccio Ordine was not in Cueto’s land yesterday to receive applause for his intelligence.

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