Gregorio Luri: the master of the capacity to return

In Agüimes, a municipality in southeast Gran Canaria, a world-famous sociologist and a schoolteacher who was dying to ask him an impertinent question crossed paths years ago. The sociologist was Zygmunt Bauman, the man who taught our era to call itself "liquid." The teacher was Gregorio Luri, and the question was this: Do you really believe that everything is liquid? Bauman looked at him and replied: Precisely because everything is liquid, love must be solid.

Luri tells the anecdote without solemnity, as if passing a glass of water. But to those who live surrounded by discourses on permanent change—and in the university, one lives surrounded by them—that answer offers something that almost no discourse does: a place to find one's footing.

Gregorio Luri was a schoolteacher before he was a philosopher, and that hierarchy explains almost everything else. He has written an entire library on learning, families, school, and common sense, with a clarity that discomforts and, at the same time, liberates. In one of his most recent books, Prohibido repetir (Rosamerón, 2024), he returns to what he has been doing for decades: defending the school against its own fashions, without nostalgia and without taking sides. "We must look for the good wherever it is," he said when presenting it, "and if it is in a new methodology, let us adopt it." He is not an enemy of the new; he is an examiner of the new. The difference matters because on it depends whether his harshest criticisms—"overprotection is a form of abuse," for example—sound like what they are: the care of someone who has spent his life in real classrooms, with real students.

The Ephemeral Gaze

We already mentioned in this notebook that the average screen time of an adult is around 47 seconds, and that the first lesson of TheNomba’s journey is, precisely, a class by Luri on attention. What we had not told was how he defines the problem, because his definition changes the entire diagnosis. The opposite of attention, he says, is not distraction: it is the ephemeral gaze. And he explains it with a journey. There are those who return from a "wonderful" week spent in Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and New York; he prefers those who spent four days in a small town square with a coffee on the corner. The ephemeral gaze has traveled through everything and seen nothing.

Science backs up the core of that intuition with an image that is hard to forget. In 2014, a team led by Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert published a series of experiments in Science on what happens when someone is left alone with their thoughts. In the most famous one, students from the University of Virginia had to spend fifteen minutes doing nothing, with no phone, no paper, just thinking; in the room was a button that delivered an electric shock that they all knew about and had declared unpleasant—so much so that they said they would pay not to experience it again. Two out of three men, and one out of four women, preferred the shock to silence. Luri often cites this experiment in his classes and has a name for what it reveals: anonymous time. Time without content has become unbearable to us, and the trap is that it cannot be filled by stuffing things inside it. You have to put something of yourself into it.

And here comes the nuance that separates him from the prophets of the attentional apocalypse, and which is worth telling in full. Luri is no longer sure that young people have lost their capacity for attention. For a long time he thought they had; now he suspects they have lost it mostly in school activities, while keeping it intact for what matters to them. Attention, he reminds us, is fragile in everyone—he is convinced that even the Pope gets distracted. That is why his definition of educated attention is not that of one who never wanders, but that of one who knows how to return: the capacity of return. Distraction requires no will; returning does. Training attention is training the return.

Understanding Before Opining

The great intellectual effort, Luri argues, is not criticism but description: knowing how to see what is there. And his complaint about our times is summed up in one of his phrases: we are educating to opine before making the effort to understand. He likes to illustrate this with Marx, who wrote that philosophers had only interpreted the world when the point was to change it. Luri responds that the logical conclusion of that premise was different. If so many brilliant people have spent centuries trying to interpret the world without quite succeeding, what follows is that interpreting the world is not easy at all—and that wanting to change what has not been understood carries risks, because the urgency to act rarely waits for understanding.

Hence his most cited and uncomfortable criticism: the great sin of modern pedagogy is pursuing emotional well-being by lowering academic standards. It does not work, he says, because well-being is not achieved by evading demands, but through them. Rigorous knowledge provides what he calls experiences of order; it has, in his words, a therapeutic power. When we said in this notebook that virtue is trained, the argument was related to this: the programs that leave a mark are those that treat the student as someone capable of more, not as someone to be protected from difficulty.

Judgment and the Art of Not Knowing

Judgment is the word of this house, and Luri places a strict condition upon it: judgment is always under construction. One can never say, "I already have the formula for the truth of the world"; what we know are minuscule fragments of reality. That is why he recommends starting where Luis Vives, the Valencian humanist, started, with what he called the ars nesciendi: the art of not knowing, building an honest image of one's own ignorance. From that asymmetry—immense ignorance, minuscule knowledge—Luri draws a conclusion that should preside over many a classroom: judgment is inseparable from humility.

And how is it cultivated? His answer is the age-old humanist method: slow reading. Nietzsche declared himself a "teacher of slow reading" and asked to read as cows ruminate, twice per bite. Josep Pla, at fifteen, spent hours in front of a pine tree on the Costa Brava describing its trunk. To pay attention, in the end, is to give importance to things: it is impossible to sustain one's gaze on what is found to have no value, just as the lover finds no effort in looking. Luri learned this from a 16th-century mystic, Malón de Chaide: small things can be known without loving them; great things cannot. Love is clairvoyant. Why this training involves whole novels and not summaries is something we already discussed at length here.

The Bow Is Not Always Taut

What prevents Luri from being turned into a performance guru is his distrust of permanent tension. He likes a story relayed by Cassian: a hunter found Saint John caressing a partridge and reproached him for wasting time. Saint John asked him why he did not keep his bow always taut. Because it would lose its strength, the hunter replied. The same happens in human life, the saint concluded. Moments of pause and moments of dispersion are needed; singing summer hits in the shower is also part of the program. Moreover, creativity appears precisely when one lets attention play on its own—the insoluble problem that solves itself on the way to the fountain. Mastering attention includes choosing to rest. Nothing to do with guilt; everything to do with self-governance.

The Journey's First Lesson

In the journey of TheNomba, Luri is the first ally the student sits with. He opens the first stage by teaching how to overcome the guardian of the threshold—the distraction that stands in the way of any inner life; he reappears in the second to disarm transhumanism with a phrase that deserves a blackboard: we are not machines with a mystery, but mysteries with some machine; and he returns in the third, when it is time to think about liquidity, with the Bauman anecdote included. He does not teach study techniques. He teaches a map of one's own interior and the way to defend it.

For a twenty-year-old university student, surrounded by tools that perform tasks for them, Luri's promise is not to produce more. It is to regain the capacity to spend four days in the small square: to look slowly at something that deserves it, to return when the mind wanders, and not to apologize for the partridge moments. He says it himself of the classics: an author is not outdated for having lived centuries ago; they will be outdated if they say nothing interesting to us. If they do, they are our contemporary. Few contemporaries are so much our own.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.