Dream and Life

“Dream as if you'll live forever, live as if you'll die today.”

James Dean

Santiago Aranegui

"His great intellect and wealth of knowledge always distinguished him as a professor and a radio talent," Puig said.

"Imagine. There were so many things," said Marisela Aranegui. "Sometimes we would go to Dadeland Mall, which was close to our house, and we couldn't walk three steps without someone approaching to say, 'Professor! Professor!' as if he were some celebrity."

"He was someone venerated by his students and known in the community for creating the good through his wisdom," Padrón said.

These are great descriptions of a great man that left so much warmth within the hearts of those he touched.

Coral Gable Library

Photographs taken of the Coral Gable Library.

Toba khedoori

Naoya Hatakeyama

Slow Glass, 2001

Why I Write

"Of course I stole the title for this talk, from George Orwell. One reason I stole it was that I like the sound of the words: Why I Write. There you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this:
I

I

I 

I stole the title not only because the words sounded right but because they seemed to sum up, in a no-nonsense way, all I have to tell you. Like many writers I have only this one “subject,” this one “area”: the act of writing. I can bring you no reports from any other front. I may have other interests: I am “interested,” for example, in marine biology, but I don’t flatter myself that you would come out to hear me talk about it. I am not a scholar. I am not in the least an intellectual, which is not to say that when I hear the word “intellectual” I reach for my gun, but only to say that I do not think in abstracts. During the years when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley, I tried, with a kind of hopeless late-adolescent energy, to buy some temporary visa into the world of ideas, to forge for myself a mind that could deal with abstract.
In short I tried to think. I failed. My attention veered inexorably back to the specific, to the tangible, to what was generally considered, by everyone I knew then and for that matter have known since, the peripheral. I would try to contemplate the Hegelian dialectic and would find myself concentrating instead on a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor. I would try to read linguistic theory and would find myself wondering instead if the lights were on in the bevatron up the hill. When I say that I was wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron you might immediately suspect, if you deal in ideas at all, that I was registering the bevatron as a political symbol, thinking in shorthand about the military-industrial complex and its role in the university community, but you would be wrong. I was only wondering if the lights were on in the bevatron, and how they looked. A physical fact.

Excerpt Joan Didion’s Why I Write, originally published in The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976.