Source: Kismet Mag
This is an essay by Xita Rubert, a Spanish novelist, who in 2024 received the Premio Herralde, the most prestigious prize for a novel in the Spanish language. She is based in New York and is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Princeton University.
This essay is about caregiving for her father who had dementia and hallucinations. Excerpt:
In Spanish, the expression santo loco—in English the ‘holy fool’—refers to someone who feigns foolishness or insanity: their unconventional behavior is puzzling, irritates those around them, but this shock is often deliberate, planned. … As I see it, holy fools represent a kind of impersonal wisdom—a mode of being beyond selfhood as we commonly understand and value it: they appear to act and speak to something beyond themselves, beyond immediate understanding. They are attuned to things the rest of us cannot hear or see.