Colinas on Fray Luis

I'm listening to all my songs on my ipad in order, and right now the "song" I'm listening to is an hour-long lecture by the Spanish poet Antonio Colinas on mysticism in the poetry of Fray Luis de León, which I downloaded from the Fundación Juan March. It is a thing of beauty. I wish I had had access to this kind of thing when I was first learning Spanish. In the 1970s you could barely get cassette tapes of salsa music, even in California. The idea of 100s of hours of lectures on Spanish literature that could be gotten for free would have seemed utopian to me. Coming up next will be Colinas's lecture on María Zambrano.

I looked up Juan March the other day, and discovered that he was a fabulously wealthy and powerful Franquista businessman. I'm very glad that something good resulted from such an apparently evil person. No hay bien que por mal no venga. Or maybe no hay mal que por bien no venga.