Horace Gonzalez He died on June 22, 2021 at the age of 77, due to complications caused by the coronavirus. Sociologist, teacher, writer, former director of the National Library and member of the group Open letterwas one of the most outstanding intellectuals of the last decades in Argentina.
What tributethe National Library dedicates a day to it on Wednesday 22, between 12:30 and 7:00 p.m. Readings, music and meetings will be part of this Horacio Gonzalez Marathon. The climax will be the announcement of the name change of the Museum of the book and the language, which from this year will bear his name. The program of the day can be consulted on the official website of the National Library.
In addition, a special issue of the magazine “The Library”, with the title “Books and life”, is dedicated to his memory. There, prominent intellectuals who knew him and worked with him record the reading of different texts written by González. Among these intellectuals are Juan Sasturain, current director of the Library; Rodolfo Fogwill, Carlos Bernatek, Eduardo Grüner, Ricardo Forster, Javier Trimboli, Luis Gusmán and many more.
“As in no other area -big or small, from a Secretariat to a simple management kiosk- of the vast organization chart of the State referring to Culture, the initiative, dedication, brilliance and creativity have been as decisive as in the case by Horacio González in the Library. For this reason, this was and will always be Horacio’s Library. As in football, he put his stamp on it, his style, his wisdom and his incredible capacity for work”, Juan Sasturain wrote about him on the occasion of this anniversary.
Within the tribute volume, the main speeches that Horacio González gave in his role as director are reproduced. Here we reproduce a fragment of his farewell speech.
Without us, we are nothing.
Fragment of Horacio González’s farewell speech from the director of the National Library, in 2015.
“The solitude of the goalkeeper at the time of the penalty is similar to the solitude of the orator at the moment of speaking… This last year that we have shared with Teresa (Parodi) was of deep significance for me. I do not want to diminish any of the previous moments of the ten years that we were in the National Library, but for the first time a high government official coincided with a friend, with a great popular singer, with a popular artist recognized throughout the country. The truth is that I feel that it is a pity that it has not lasted longer, but we have to feed on that pity because indeed the moments that are going to come are not easy. Perhaps the previous one was not easy either and we simply did not realize it because we had work instruments, strong recognition from the public space, from the national State, the support of the government… And there was no lack of discussions of all kinds. I gave myself many luxuries here; I have to thank the government for the luxury I gave myself of having criticized it not infrequently, but because I always believed that a popular process of the magnitude of the one inaugurated by Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Kirchner needed many thoughts, needed multiplicity, others will call it plurality, it doesn’t matter , but it required a multiplicity of thoughts, it required the multiple of criticism. He specified that politics should not only be reduced to the computation of minutes by the judicial structure, that is not politics. If Argentina is going to live its next few years counting the minutes of power, that is no longer power. Power is something democratic, disseminated, broad and recognizable. The best form of power is not recognized by minutes or symbols, it is recognized by feelings and these are fleeting. The best form of power has a transience that is not that of the minute hand, that is where many are wrong today.
We have to transcend these moments, this Library is very transcendent, it is a very old library. The building is not old, we are not old, there are very young workers, who enter this Library as young people and perhaps they will not continue here or perhaps they will become the oldest workers in the Library, we do not know, but the Library is very ancient we know as much as it is one of the master beams of the history of the Argentine nation. So all of us who are here are part, by the mere fact of being, of a history of the Argentine nation that is not a single history, whoever thinks so is wrong, it does not homogenize anyone’s conscience, it does not make anyone part of a single conscience makes us all much freer to know that we are part of a community. A community is a symptom of freedom, not a compulsory form of coexistence. I think that in these years we formed that type of community, we formed that community of free men and women, in each of the professions that we had, from the workshop maker to the boilermaker, from the librarian to the electrician, because this is a city too. There are cities in the interior of the country that have fewer inhabitants than the number of workers that the Library has, it is a small city but not in the interior, it is a few meters from the port, a few meters from the glyptodont buried here, a few meters from the Villa 31 which is a very complex place in Argentina, it is a place of poverty and also of speculation, it is the place of a promise. So, the Library is with its directive rays directed towards all those places of the republic or the nation, as we want to call it. Sometimes when we wake up in the morning we say “the republic”, why not be republicans, and at night we say “the nation”, why not be from the nation, we are of all those dimensions.
The Library plays a fundamental role in politics and national culture, not only because Borges was there, that is already important; not only because Groussac was there, an absolutely conservative gentleman, but it didn’t matter to us because, although we believe that we are not conservatives, we also respect the legacies so much that we study, sometimes, the conservatives much more than the revolutionaries. I think it’s a little ruse of history to lead us to study the conservatives much more than they are for a reason, we will not agree with them politically, but they include the Greeks, the Romans, the Etruscans and the Chaldeans; and we, sometimes, being so revolutionary we stay in the previous minute like the Argentine judges who are in the minute. We are in the millennia, so our life has something of the millennial and something of the minute too, why should we deny it? (…)”.
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