As a Millennial born in the late 1980s, I feel entitled to the nostalgia for the 20th century. When asked about my birth year, I’m happy to share that I was born in the 80s, “a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.” Even though I was alive for less than a year in the decade, at times, it feels as if the origins of synth and new wave dance-pop were also mine.

The era of watershed historical events, such as the formation of the British band New Order and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, seems to be over. Although Joy Division still appears on some Spotify playlists, and the ghost of the Cold War lingers, History seems now much more fluid and synchronous than it is clearly divided into epochs and generations.

We no longer listen to entire CDs while holding the lyric booklet and reading along. Each time I select my birth year in a digital box and scroll to find it, the process gets longer. Pompeii still exists as a frozen image of the past, now including DNA findings and 4-dimensional (4D) renderings. Meanwhile, Egypt has opened a new museum that speaks to European Orientalism, as Palestinian and American academic, literary critic and political activist Edward Said might have said, yet it also promises a postcolonial future.

Author photo of the Egypt-inspired Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas, shaped like a pyramid, and the nearby thematic structures, such as the pharaonic sphinx.

Some days, I can’t reconcile the melancholy of leaving something behind. For whatever reason, holding on to pieces of how things used to be feels revolutionary. It’s as if sending handwritten letters by regular mail or reading a book instead of looking at your phone were acts of rebellion. I often wonder what it was like to wait for a letter you really wanted to arrive. What was it like back then, before social media imposed its rhythm and determined the time and space, leaving lovers at the mercy of the postal service while they agonized for a response?

The first time I heard the 20th century referred to as the past was in a 2023 film, and I was taken aback. The film was about the indie Spanish pop band Los Planetas (“The Planets”), set in the 90s. The off-voice, however, spoke from the 2000s, creating a dissonance that made me realize the 20th century is now officially the distant past. Los Planetas have a song about unrequited love that I especially resonate with. It’s called “La Playa” (The Beach), and the lyrics are about the desperation of waiting for a phone call when cell phones still didn’t exist:

The summer you were at the beach.
I was home alone,
Not knowing what was going on.
You didn’t call me once.
I wondered what you were doing,
I was dying of jealousy.
Every time I thought about it,
Every time others mentioned you.

The film in question, titled Segundo Premio (2024), is a fictionalized account of the band’s origins, exploring heartbreak through a love triangle among its members and the sometimes blurry lines between friendship and attraction. Fascinatingly to me, the story draws references from Federico García Lorca, the renowned poet from Granada and an authority on the multifaceted subject of love, who was tragically murdered by Spanish General and Dictator Francisco Franco’s troops during the Spanish Civil War in 1936.

One of Lorca’s poems, “Blind Panorama of New York,” touches me deeply. In these mysterious verses, the theme of unrequited love takes on a new, amplified meaning, revealing the narcissistic dimension of the feeling in a profoundly beautiful way:

Many times I’ve lost myself

in order to search for the burn that keeps things awake

and I’ve only found sailors leaning over the railing

and small creatures of the sky buried in the snow.

But real grief was in other plazas

where chrystallized fish agonized inside the tree trunks;

plazas of a strange sky for the ancient untouched statues

and for the tender intimacies of volcanoes.

There’s a rumor that Lorca was planning to flee Spain with his boyfriend at the time and seek exile, as other intellectuals had done before the start of the dictatorship. However, he didn’t have time. In these verses, he references the search for the flame that keeps things alive. I like to think that I understand Lorca because I have sometimes diagnosed myself or my friends with limerence, another name for obsessive love, which contemporary psychiatrists call a dopamine addiction. I think the modern world is full of this.

Instead of sailors leaning over railings, today’s seekers sometimes find more dazzling profiles when scrolling through dating apps — if they are lucky. Dante Alighieri, the author of The Divine Comedy (as well as its main character), too, had to wait to catch a glimpse of Beatrice — one of the main characters of the opus, possibly inspired by a real person — in profile, her face partially covered by a veil, from a distance at Mass, as that was the only time she left the house. Perhaps that was as unique as a good swipe — a small gesture upon which oceans of ideas can be built.

This is the cover of a book by Ian Gibson, an expert biographer of Lorca. The book is about the ambiguous relationship between Lorca and Salvador Dalí. The English subtitle reads, “The Love That Could Not Be.”

In the early days of social media, the American television channel MTV popularized a reality series called Catfish. Each episode attempted to determine whether the person behind an online profile with whom someone had a romantic relationship, sometimes lasting years, was real. Almost always, they were not. Today, so-called love scams are still commonplace.

In the United States and Europe, new cases emerge every few days of women who have lost all their pension money to a US soldier stranded on an oil mission with no way of returning home. Coincidentally and revealingly, all of these long-distance suitors were unavailable for video calls. Police operations have revealed that many of these scams are carried out by specialized networks across Africa. The irony of the dissonance between the material and emotional economies speaks for itself.

Quixotic echoes of love

I began this Wednesday reflection, which I wanted to share with you, dear readers of Fair Observer, by talking about my generational place, even though we had already agreed that generations have gone out of fashion. Even going out of fashion has gone out of fashion.

As I also carry the effects (and defects) of being European and Spanish, I cannot help but continue digging into the archaeology of things, and I have to close these lines with a memory of Don Quixote de La Mancha, of course. Last month, a film about the life of Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes was released. It is a homoerotic interpretation of the time the writer spent imprisoned in North Africa. The film is, allegedly, based on real archival documents that prove Cervantes was tried for “sodomic acts” by the Spanish Inquisition.

What I am getting at is that the story of Don Quixote — also known as Alonso Quijano — is both hopeful and tragic in terms of love and human nature. Fortunately, Cervantes treats everything with a touch of humor. As the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño said in The Savage Detectives (1998): “Everything that begins as tragedy can end as tragicomedy.” Bolaño was surely thinking of Cervantes when he wrote this.

In Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote falls in love with Dulcinea del Toboso based on hearsay. This literary trope of falling in love from hearsay comes from the tradition of oral poetry. Known as a Neoplatonic trope, it speaks of love from afar through stories of others when the beloved has not even been seen. In the case of Dulcinea, she lives in the next village, Toboso, which, at that time, was considered sort of far away. Thus, Sancho Panza, the faithful squire, is sent as an emissary to deliver a letter containing Don Quixote’s declaration of love to her.

Through Sancho’s realistic perspective, the reader realizes that Dulcinea is actually Aldonza Lorenzo, a pig farmer far removed from the princess Don Quixote described. I will end with part of Sancho’s account of the encounter with Dulcinea to Don Quixote, and I wish you a good rest of the week:

“She didn’t read the letter,” said Sancho, “because she said she couldn’t read or write. Instead, she tore it up into little pieces, saying she didn’t want anyone else to read it, so that her secrets wouldn’t be known in the village, and that what I had told her about your love for her and the extraordinary penance you are enduring for her sake was enough. And finally, she told me to tell you that she kisses your hands, and that she is left there with more desire to see you than to write to you, and that she begs and commands you, upon hearing this, to come out of those bushes and stop doing foolish things, and set out immediately for Toboso, unless something more important happened, because she has a great desire to see you.

In a world where the speed of a swipe can eclipse the patience of a handwritten letter, the very act of pausing (to read, to reflect, to remember) becomes a quiet form of resistance. Fair Observer exists to give that pause a platform: a space where histories, cultures and personal stories intersect, where the past is not merely archived but interrogated and where the complexities of our shared present are examined with rigor and empathy. By weaving together the echoes of Lorca, the beats of Joy Division and the lingering anticipation of a postcard, we invite readers to look beyond the instant, to cherish the layers of memory that shape us and to join a community committed to thoughtful, inclusive discourse.