Although Marías published short essays in the Spanish press and wrote articles for newspapers as early as 1976, it was not until December of 1994, when he agreed to undertake what he has called his “tareas dominicales” (“Sunday tasks”) for the magazine El Semanal, that he began to write a regular weekly column. For Marías, who had drolly embraced writing as a way to avoid holding a regular job bound by a fixed work schedule, the commitment to meet a deadline, and to be paid for doing so, seemed somewhat odd as well as potentially treacherous. He noted in November of 1996, while writing his one-hundred-fourth column for El Semanal, that he was still befuddled by his initial decision to write every week and somewhat amused by his perseverance over the previous two years. As he put it to his readers in “La infancia recuperada” (“Childhood Recovered”), “En principio estaba en contra de escribir a fecha fija, y era más bien partidario de hacerlo sólo cuando verdaderamente tuviera ganas, algo que comentar y tiempo para ello. Bueno, aún estoy en contra de lo que vengo haciendo desde hace dos años ante ustedes …” (“In the beginning, I was opposed to writing to meet a deadline; I was instead inclined to do it only when I truly felt like it, when I had something to say and time for it.