The Subversive Intellect ... And I remember it was then, for the first time, that I watched the gods. They danced among transparent red flames over a resinous wooden torch, at a place where mountains pursue other mountains. It happened more than forty years ago, when I was fourteen and hiked with my grandfather Henri the majestic mountainsides of the Pyrenees. We were inside a cave inhabited by man in the Upper Paleolithic some thirty-five thousand years ago. In a masterly, apparently chaotic and unorthodox rock painting-the gods were present... That one anonymous and incipient Homo sapiens, in the midst of the inhospitable glacial age, making a huge effort to write analogically, ideographically, without words, had left on that rock all of his abstract ideas about spirits, demons, nature and, especially about the gods. Without a doubt, he believed he was strong enough to subdue those higher powers, he had acquired an awareness of his own ken and faculty of observation which he invoked to perform extraordinary deeds, to master the elements and even to change the paths of the stars. Illustrious Ulysses from the land of thoughts... Those were the best years of my life, by my grandfather's side. He was my illustrious Ulysses from the land of thought. An unequaled teacher and friend; a critical and profound humanist. I remember that when he spoke he would set his deep, slow gaze on whomever he was talking with at the time. The air around him seemed to turn lighter and his words seemed to become etched in fire in the deepest reaches of the soul. His teachings by way of syllogisms motivated me to browse the pages of the Universe as if it were a book of endless sequences. Since my early adolescence he initiated me in the arts of abstract thinking, of conceiving ideas in terms of fluid permutations instead of addressing problems with the simple-mindedness of traditional education. He opened wide the doors to the study of knowledge, from Anaximander of Miletus and Pythagoras' cosmogony to Heraclitus' daring explanations of physics and on to Poseidonius, the inquisitive descendant of the great Ionians, to Cleanthes and the first atomic theories of Leucippus and Democritus. From Parmenides' concept of unity and immutability to Epicurus and Lucretius and on to Quintillan's hexameter (where, how, what, who and why), and together we would read the prodigious Sidereus nuncius by Galileo, the Messenger of the Stars... Then later to the rationalism of Descartes, passing through the pluricentric approach of the innumerable worlds of Giordano Bruno and Laplace's analytical theory of mathematical probabilities, from Newton to the combative and contradictory spirit of Voltaire, Kant and his critical philosophy of knowledge; Locke's essay on human understanding. Paul so, so many others: the positivists, Comte, Hume, Condorcet. Plurality and substitution of knowledge. And thus, together, we would read and read again... He taught me to plunge into science as if it were art and into the critical and rational philosophy of knowledge, in which you don't intend to find, as happens in philosophy or metaphysics, the cause of things but rather the laws that rule them. You don't get there in a day. You need years, many years of exercise; it is at times so difficult for awareness and will to coincide, the only way to go through that "narrow door" into the immensity of the invisible universe. My grandfather's books, his library. I spent most of my childhood and my youth in my grandfather's library, and, looking back, as I grew older the memories of that library assumed epic proportions. It became my world, as boundless as the transfinite universe. Opening those books-it was like finding my spiritual family. In the safety of your secret hideaways you choose your teachers as you would in an rite of passage. At first you can't see the wave that has been approaching you. Many years must pass before you can notice you don't see the world through your former eyes. The paths our lives take are tied to this transformation in our thinking. We become that which shapes us. How could I fail to remember that small old lovable German telescope dating back to the turn of the century! With it he taught me to identify constellations and stars: Alpha Centauri, Beta Persei, Orion, Piscis Austrinus, Ursa Minor, Swan, Sirius, Vega. And in the summers, on the night of August 24, we followed the ritual of watching Regulus in the constellation Leo and witness the magic moment it disappeared from the heavenly dome-the twentieth brightest star in the firmament was that night hidden by the Sun, because it exactly crossed its ecliptic. And I remember it happened then... ...when we were hiking in the late afternoon among the huge oaks and beech-trees. Those were the last days in the life of a man who was cultured in the purest humanism. — "What's wrong, Enrique, why did you stop?" — "Look, grandpa, those flowers! I've never seen anything like it!" I bent down to draw near those little bell-shaped flowers with a thin stem and a soft golden hue, hardly visible with the earthen tones reflected from the ground. He nodded and smiled. — "They can only be found in this meadow and that one over there," he said, pointing west. —"And most people have never seen them, since they only blossom during three or four days." — "But it's almost nightfall!" — I insisted. "And they're still open!" — "You know something?" — he said, placing his warm hand on my shoulder. "They don't even have a name. Tradition says that, because their life is so short, they don't dare-they don't dare close their buds." I still feel in my chest, as if my nerves still held memories of their own, the deep sadness and frustration I felt at my inability to tell my grandfather how much I loved him. So many years have gone by but in the distance I can still see clearly his dignified countenance, and, in my thoughts and memory, I am always looking at him... How long has it been? It happened only... yesterday. 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