I haven’t yet read El Intelectual Melancolico: Un Panfleto (The Melancholy Intellectual: A Pamphlet) by Jordi Gracia, professor of Spanish literature at the University of Barcelona — not for lack of interest, but, simply because I haven’t seen it in any bookshops.

For that reason, I can neither agree nor disagree with Gracia. But I’ve read numerous reviews of this brief work. Gracia doesn’t mention any names, which means that none of the melancholy doomsayers in his sights have, so far, taken his comments personally.

On reading the reviews, however, I couldn’t help feeling he was talking about me. This rap across the knuckles has made me wonder if, perhaps, I have become a wet blanket.

The people under attack by the author, it seems, are those who see the present age as a period of near-disastrous decadence, at least in the fields of education and culture — Jeremiahs who rant on about minor problems and dismiss the countless good things about our age, turning their backs on technological innovations and bemoaning the loss of “old” knowledge and customs.

I am, of course, guilty of seeing our age as particularly imbecilic, but that doesn’t mean I’m especially melancholy or nostalgic, at least not for the decades I myself have known.

I was 20 in 1971, and unlike many people, I certainly don’t yearn for my lost youth. Even at the time, the ’60s seemed to me boring and stupid; in fact, I hold them responsible for much of the current drift toward idiocy.

Back then, however, not wishing to get left behind, and despite my reservations, I myself committed or contributed to many acts of arrant stupidity. But that’s understandable in a 20-year-old. What I find harder to comprehend is the way some people insist on remaining permanently “modern”, even though they’re now full-grown adults.

If “melancholy” intellectuals do exist, then there are also “chronological” ones, the kind who uncritically embrace the latest fashion, even if that means regularly having to revise and even contradict their views.

They’re the kind who maintain, with blind faith, that whatever is most recent is inevitably the best. They’re unaware that chronological order has little to do with progress — the strictly scientific and technical variety — nor with progressive thinking.

Had he lived in the 19th century, this brand of intellectual would have declared that, seen from the perspective of 1825, the French Revolution was behind the times.

Such a figure has much in common with another perennial type whom I have referred to as the “adultescent”: The mature, even elderly and often rather pathetic individual who can’t bear to feel out of step with the times — something that happens to most of us sooner or later —and who renounces his or her beliefs and values so as not to get left behind.

Adultescents abjectly praise whatever each decade’s young people worship, regardless of whether it’s an advance or a reversal, a stroke of genius or a complete waste of time.

Obviously, there are good things about the current age — who can deny it? But, there are far more that I find unacceptable. And, I repeat, I myself have yet to experience a “golden age” on which I can look back fondly.

What do people expect? Why should I celebrate the rank mediocrity and boundless stupidity of politicians?

And why should I rejoice as the written and spoken language grows ever more impoverished and garbled, or smile as the growth of available information is matched by a growing, even smug ignorance?

Another thing I can’t stand is the way clichés have become so entrenched in everyday speech. I break out in a rash every time I hear someone use expressions such as “the alternative society”, “the elephant in the room”, “the dominant ideology”, “the information age” or the “dictatorship of the markets”.

I find it hard to feel interested in novels about the internet. It’s like being fascinated by aviation or the telephone when they were first invented. I’m sure there were books written about them as well — and immediately relegated to oblivion.

It’s no source of joy to me that every teacher I know, regardless of nationality, tells me that most of the students arriving at universities nowadays are borderline illiterate; nor that courtesy and reasoned debate have been almost banished from Spain, while, on the other hand, there is a growing Puritanism — for example, the government bans on smoking.

And needless to say, I blush at the inane, inconsequential discussions that abound in the press, on TV and radio, and in cyberspace.

So I confess to being guilty as charged (of being melancholy or whatever).

As I’ve said on more than one occasion: I feel that I’m an anachronism, and that’s only right and proper. Rebelling against that feeling would be an interminable, not to say ridiculous task, worthy of Sisyphus himself.

(The New York Times News Service)