Adrian Cristobal, intellectual

I do not know Adrian Cristobal personally. It doesn’t matter to me that he wrote for Marcos. Or that he earned awards and honorary doctorates from two or more universities. I read at one time that he delivered a lecture on the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas at the University of Santo Tomas. In one of the news stories about his death, I learned that he once served as a full professor of the University of the Philippines despite (or in spite) being a college drop out from the same institution. I have a high regard for the man as an intellectual, which Wikipedia defines as “one who tries to use his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate, or ask and answer questions about a wide variety of different ideas.”

As a columnist of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Manila Bulletin and the Philippine Graphic, Cristobal asked questions about age, death, politics, economics, philosophy, theology, etc. He was one writer who could allow the reader to see the difficult questions behind simple things, such as when he sort of told Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo that there’s no truth to the statement that it’s lonely up there when you’re on top of the political ladder as president. He could also be sarcastic. At one time he wrote about a group that informed him of his nomination for best opinion writer. When asked to submit at least five of his columns and an endorsement from his publisher, he did not just simply say no. Instead, he used his pen to dismantle the false but hidden arguments behind the invitation.

Cristobal wrote like Nietzsche and Camus, who were among his favorite writers. He defended the superiority of prose because, he says, it is not easy to comfort or inflict a reader with every sentence that he reads. 


True to his word, Cristobal delights his readers with every sentence in his columns. There’s no need for him to write about big ideas or controversial issues to make his columns interesting. He could make something ordinary interesting and make something interesting ordinary. 


Cristobal’s ideas on print will surely be missed by those who have become accustomed to his style of writing.

About the picture: Temenos #9: The Writer; Oil, Acrylic on Canvas; 29 15/16 in x 40 in; Collection of Jason Hughes)