La Voz de Galicia – 19 de xullo, 2026 →
I’ll borrow a few words from a book by Vila-Matas, which in turn refers to a line from Hamlet: “Words, words,” Hamlet says, “to suggest (…) that every human assertion is, by necessity, a conjecture.” And I’ll hold on to those words as a way of speaking about how difficult it is to make sense of the way we relate to one another today.
The same scene plays out day after day: in a café, on a walk, in a restaurant, in a doctor’s waiting room—an older person accompanied by someone younger, who is looking at a phone. And by younger I don’t mean only teenagers—those we are always so quick to blame for the habits they inherited from us—but people my own age as well, those of us in our forties and fifties who, without even realizing it, reach for our phones for no reason other than to avoid being fully present in those moments of waiting, leisure, or companionship.
The other day, on one of my walks, I found myself watching what looked like a grandmother walking alongside her grandson, and suddenly I realized that the way she looked at him was the same way my mother looks at me when we’re sitting together in the garden and I’m on my phone. She watches me in silence, not wanting to interrupt in case I’m working, when in fact I’m doing nothing at all. Worse still, what I’m really doing is not being there with her—talking, daydreaming, or simply saying nothing. On that walk, that grandmother looked at her grandson in much the same way, perhaps unsure whether to speak or to remain silent, while the boy, smiling, looked at his phone, wandering through that other parallel life of which we have all, by now, become victims.
