Blog — IntentionsDante Noguez |
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Tchaikovsky composed the Pas de deux shortly after his sister died. It is the most beautiful and moving piece of music I have ever heard in my life.
In 2016, I devoted the month of September to reading Cervantes’ Quijote; it was a Porrúa edition that I borrowed from the university library. It did make me laugh a lot.
In 2017, I began reading Borges. I had spent a month reading the Quijote in order to understand Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, but I still did not understand it. I spent months reading Borges in the afternoons. One day I shed tears of beauty while reading him.
The Picture of Dorian Gray shook my brain like no other book has. The preface, which Wilde wrote in response to the criticism he received after publishing it, is the most perfect definition of literature. The display of wit and acuity, the contempt for industriousness, the notion of the intellect as an instrument of play, caprice and character, and the Aristotelian idea of literature as an end in itself are some of the organizing principles of that irresistible world that is Oscar Wilde’s literature.
I dedicated Cigarettes and coffee by Otis Redding to Elizabeth when I fell in love with her.
In 2018, walking through the gardens of CREFAL in Patzcuaro, I understood Led Zeppelin’s first album and it became my favourite.
The videotapes of Guns N’ Roses at Rock in Rio 2001 and Michael Jackson’s HIStory tour in Munich in 1997: my earliest musical memories.
When I was little, I would hear the music of George Michael and Enya from my bedroom whenever my mother played their CDs on a Sony AIWA CX-NA888 stereo.
Good thoughts bad thoughts by Funkadelic and Shine a light by Spiritualized: the music that saved me from despair and illness in 2021.
In 2015, I spent a night listening to Max Reger’s arrangement for piano and violin of Mariä Wiegenlied. In the morning, my father asked me what that melody was.
I remember when Professor Rafael Peña read us The Nightingale and the Rose in class. He liked the reflection I wrote about it. My classmates passed my notebook around to read it and it left them smiling.
In 2025, I visited the Museo del Prado for the first time. I looked very closely at Velazquez’s paintings; I observed the brushstrokes in confusion, trying to determine whether they were human or celestial. It was afterward, while walking through the Barrio de las Letras, that I realized the men of the Golden Age were men of flesh and blood, not mythological beings; people who inhabited the same world I inhabit and walked the same streets I walk. In the days that followed, Bernini and the Sistine Chapel once again blurred for me the line between the real and the eidetic. At the end of my trip, I had dinner with Ernesto Castro and my wife and realized that I could not only contemplate the supernatural but also enter into dialogue with it.
Time by Pink Floyd moved me to tears one day in May 2026 while I gazed at the Zaragozan sky through the window. At different stages of my life I have had similar experiences with Strawberry fields forever by the Beatles, Clair de lune by Isao Tomita, Try some buy some by George Harrison, Hallelujah by Jeff Buckley and Flume by Bon Iver.
While going through my first heartbreak in 2015, I spent an afternoon in Huecorio helping my grandfather with carpentry work in his workshop. On the radio, Arvo Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel began to play; with a lump in my throat, I asked my grandfather what that music was. Days later, he gave me an Arvo CD. Lou Reed’s Satellite of love and Alice in Chains’ Nutshell accompanied me during that time. The rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust and the spiders from mars was the album I listened to while the relationship lasted.
I remember perfectly the day I heard Puente and Adios by Cerati for the first time: it was a perfect morning. I went out for breakfast with Frank and Rogelio at the Maison Paulette in Providencia; the sunrise was gorgeous and it was a joy to breathe the fresh air. The Uber driver was playing Cerati at full volume on the way; I did not know how to thank him for the music.
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Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
The coronavirus pandemic was the event that most devastatingly and broadly revealed to me the incredible smallness and stupidity of the people and institutions around me.
Once I threw up on the basketball court at primary school. The girl I liked was standing in front of me. She ran away.
Once a woman walked me home. At the time, I lived alone in an apartment in Morelia and slept on an inflatable mattress. When I lay down with her on the mattress, it began to deflate gradually until it brought us flush to the floor. The hardness of the floor was extremely uncomfortable and painful. Neither of us said anything and she left. The next day, she saw me kissing another woman on the Calzada Fray Antonio de San Miguel. I do not know which of the two reasons made her stop talking to me.
I remember lying on the ground and seeing a crowd of faces around me, leaning over to look at me. “Choco” had cracked my head open with a rock as I walked by. It was a normal day at the Benito Juarez primary school.
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