Living in 'interesting' times

May you live in in­ter­est­ing times” is a Chi­nese proverb that is often used wrongly. No one wants a bor­ing life (or at least we don’t think we do) and so the say­ing is often taken as a way of wish­ing some­one well (that their life be ex­cit­ing). Yet, the say­ing is ac­tu­ally a curse. “In­ter­est­ing” in this con­text sug­gests up­heaval and chaos, dan­ger and un­cer­tainty, but if we change the qual­i­fi­ca­tion slightly from a “bor­ing” life to a “quiet” life, then the sen­ti­ment be­hind the phrase be­gins to make more sense.

How­ever, any­one in Cat­alo­nia look­ing for a quiet life at the mo­ment could well be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We are in­deed liv­ing through ‘in­ter­est­ing’ times. When those times began is up for de­bate: noth­ing has been quite the same since the re­ces­sion began in 2008, for ex­am­ple. Yet what clearly makes life ‘in­ter­est­ing’ for peo­ple in Cat­alo­nia right now is the un­rav­el­ling of the in­de­pen­dence issue that came to a head, al­though not a final con­clu­sion, dur­ing 2017.

As every year at Cat­alo­nia Today, our De­cem­ber issue has a month-by-month overview of the year. Be­tween pages 17 and 41, you will find a brief sum­mary of each month, with a focus on some of the main events that hap­pened in cul­ture, sport, busi­ness, in­ter­na­tion­ally and, above all in 2017, in pol­i­tics. The re­view is not meant as a com­pre­hen­sive ex­am­i­na­tion of the year, as there is sim­ply not the space to do that, but it is an ex­cel­lent way to jog one’s mem­ory and it is a good spring­board for re­flect­ing on the 12 months we have just been through. If you haven’t done so al­ready, please go back and check it out.

As for my­self, 2017 was a very ‘in­ter­est­ing’ year. On a per­sonal level there were a num­ber of events that to some ex­tent proved life-al­ter­ing, at least po­ten­tially, as I still strug­gle with their ef­fects. How­ever, it was on the pub­lic level that this year re­ally made an im­pres­sion. When I ar­rived in Cat­alo­nia in 1990, one of the first things I learnt was that I was only nom­i­nally in Spain, and that Cat­alo­nia was seen by many peo­ple to be a sep­a­rate en­tity, at least his­tor­i­cally and cul­tur­ally if not po­lit­i­cally. Nor did it take long for me to hear the ar­gu­ments for in­de­pen­dence, the griev­ances against Spain, the heart­felt sense of iden­tity felt by many. In the more than two decades since, I have heard these ar­gu­ments over and over again. So, with the in­de­pen­dence process seem­ingly com­ing to a head this year, I was re­ally hop­ing for some sort of clo­sure or a set­tle­ment of this issue . I might have known it would not be so easy.