I’m writing today out of stubbornness, because if I let a third blank week go by I fear that I might give up entirely this blog. I’m procrastinating my proper academic writing (an article and a book chapter have been waiting for too long), and I worry that if I also delay writing yet another blog post I might enter very dangerous doldrums. This is not writer’s block, which consists of being unable to fill in a blank page, but the sheer laziness that attacks literary scholars when we conclude that nobody cares whether we publish or not. There are moments when we run the risk of no longer caring ourselves, so here I am. Ranting and raving, be warned…
The date does not help, either. It’s 31 December, the middle of the Christmas break and the last day of the year, when everyone is going through the past 365 days and anticipating the following 365. I’m sure you know that January is named after the Roman god Janus, who presides over all liminal affairs, from material gates, doorways, and passages to immaterial processes with a beginning and an end (I always marvel at the convenience of having a pagan god for everything). You are perhaps familiar with his double-headed representation, with one face looking back and the other forward; two heads totally unable to look at each other, what a symbol of time’s passing from past to future.
So, this being the end of the year, the public and the social media are today full of lists of the best of 2025 and of the most expected for 2026, and of surveys of all that went wrong in the year now ending (a lot!) and what might be even worse in 2026 (or just a bit better, for nothing will be truly good). Seeing the horrors of 2025 nobody dares anticipate a bright 2026. My own wishes are totally thanatophiliac (or death-oriented): I ardently hope that a handful of tyrants find a swift ending and the Earth breathes a bit more easily.
Since I’ve been thinking of autobiographies and memoirs in the recent weeks, as I prepare my new elective (or electives, depending on what I end up teaching in 2026-27), I can’t help thinking of the passage of time in personal ways. For me, 2026 will be the year when I turn 60, an age which surely marks a turning point in the natural, social, cultural, and personal process of ageing. A dear friend recently chided me very lovingly for my insistence on attaching importance to decades, but the fact is that in 2026 I will be starting the last decade of my career, if only for legal reasons.
University teachers retire at 70 in Spain (full professors can stay on as emeritus for up to four years, but I’m not, thankfully, in that category), so it’s time for me to start planning retirement, supposing the tyrants I alluded to do not destroy the planet. There are days when I think I’ll work until 70 to complete 45 years as a teacher/researcher; on other days, I think I’ll retire a bit earlier, perhaps at 67 or 68. If health allows it, I have at most ten academic years to try new experiences in teaching, and must carefully plan the handful of books I still want to write (perhaps even after retirement). So 2026 is not for me just the next year, but the beginning of the countdown towards retirement. I know that this countdown started back when I signed my first work contract, but it’s now entering a final phase. It’s scary, let me tell you.
The process of ageing has been described in countless literary and audiovisual works, and is daily monitored in the media (both traditional and social) with its relentless observation of the ageing bodies of public figures. Ageism is rampant at all levels because we are fixated on physical appearance although change is inevitable, despite the advances of medicine. The brain and the mind, in contrast, are far less appreciated. They only capture our collective and personal attention in relation to their possible decay, now that Alzheimer’s disease and the different types of dementia are so widespread. Some persons here in Spain are now writing wills asking for active euthanasia in case their brain is terminally diseased and they are no longer themselves. I have friends seeing a parent face that horrifying process and I totally share the urge.
The cult of the young body and the fear of brain disease are, in any case, preventing us from enjoying the beauty of a rich, mature mind. I don’t mean just an intellectually rich mind, though, of course, that should be highly appreciated, but a generally rich mind, capable of securing personal fulfilment at last and of providing others, and the community, with sound values and good living. Education is supposed to equip individuals with the means to enrich their minds so that they may enter adulthood as well balanced, fully capable persons who can be also engaged citizens seeking the best for their communities. This is the ideal, of course, though very few educational systems in the world totally respond to it, perhaps with the exception of the Scandinavian countries. Instead, our current educational systems have passed from being systems of mental and bodily repression to being a simulacrum, as philosopher Víctor Bermúdez recently warned in El País. In part, this has to do with the disconnection between generations, which is more pronounced between the youngest students and the most senior teachers.
Bermúdez explains that “I see my classmates working like crazy trying to get the students hooked. But we don’t know how to compete with, how to get to, or what to impart. And we don’t know how to recover that background of general culture, of common cultural references that children don’t get to share with us.” Yes, indeed, we lost control over education when social media took over in the early 2000s as the main providers of information and values for the young, and now AI’s LLMs are giving us the final cut. As a teacher of Literature, it was my job to guide students into admiring the beauty of human imagination and of the creative mind, and to encourage them to cultivate their own minds. This passes, I think, through learning to admire and take example from more mature minds, but, then, young influencers took over from us the job of educating our students and we face a losing battle. It gets worse as we age.
This is sad. A main pleasure of ageing is that constant discovery and the process of learning never end. If they end it’s only because people give up taking good care of their minds. I am now a student as much as when I was an actual student, for there is not a single day when I don’t learn something new from the sources I use. I truly pity the students who, as an academic colleague wrote in @BlueSky, absurdly resist being educated, for, apart from causing a waste of money, time, and resources, they show a terrible disregard for their own minds.
As researchers, in Spain we have made a gigantic effort to catch up with international research, perhaps an even more noticeable effort in English Studies because we must publish internationally (I mean within the Humanities). I think we are all bursting with ideas, and much more so as we age, but our students do not knock on our doors for a chat, to benefit from what we could share. Instead, they turn to ChatGPT which, guess what?, depends on our stolen publications to have something to say. It’s the saddest paradox.
My purpose as a teacher, then, for the following decade, beginning this new 2026, is to create as many chances as possible to talk to students, hoping that they will want to listen. In the two editions of my subject ‘Contemporary Literature in English’ I have made room, as I have explained here, for students to talk to each other 30 minutes in each session. Their mutual interaction has enriched their reviews, of this I’m sure, and helped them to practice the almost lost art of conversation, but it has also given me a chance to get closer to them. As they talk to each other, I walk around the classroom and join their conversations. I tell them about my own experience of reading the books assigned to them, I comment on film adaptations if there are any, I mention my own academic work. And I do ask a lot of questions about their preferences.
Perhaps this is what we’re missing: more conversation, more contact between young and mature minds, of a closer type, not the kind that emanates top down from the lecturing platform, as it used to do in the past. Now, the challenge is to make our richer, more mature minds attractive to our students who mainly see us, I’m afraid, as relics or freaks devoting their lives to the inscrutable purpose of learning for the sake of learning. And, yes, this all boils down to a simple point: I wanted to be a teacher because I admired my teachers and loved talking to them. I wanted to be admired (at least a little, by just a handful) and enjoy the conversation of students who loved talking to me, but, I’m now a teacher in a world no longer interested in learning. I’m facing the extinction of my profession, not just my own retirement.
As for 2025, well, here’s a paradox: it’s been for me an extremely complicated year, with still many unsolved personal issues, which explains why I needed the comfort of learning. I’ve published eight books: a monograph in English and my own translation into Spanish, a co-edited collective volume, the translation into Spanish of another co-edited volume in English, two volumes with posts from this blog, and two with work by my students. This will give you an idea of how learning has helped me to cope with the bad days. I hope my 2026 is a much happier year, and that my learning is more relaxed, which is what my mind needs at this point…
May 2026 brings you much enjoyable learning and the peace we all crave for. And down with tyranny!!