I live with books that fly, with a black cat named Pythagoras, among thousands of real and invented characters. And like Don Quixote - many times - without distinguishing reality and fiction. I live, like everyone, surrounded by imperfection. With shadows that trap and angels that sometimes save, unexpectedly.
Almost every tragedy is re-converted or re-encountered. What has happened to me has happened to you. What has happened to us has already happened before. It had happened to Proust, Virginia Woolf, Colette, ... to Hesiod, Homer, Ulysses, Sancho Panza, Mephistopheles, Virgil, Beatrice.
Books tell us about humility, because they try to recognize the essence of the human being. Once the writer leaves his work, it sails in uncertainty and moves away from or approaches a reader. It goes from the self to the collective. A reader will decipher its codes and will be a reflection of ourselves.
Writing a book is giving freedom for the word to become "common selves", it is giving knowledge and emotion to the other and learning that that other is your own mirror. The words of Luis Mateos Díez today, at the presentation of his Cervantes Prize, resonated strongly in me: "Nothing interests me less than myself." Words that can be a symptom of humility, but also of good literature.
What constitutes us as human beings is in books. Madness, jealousy, anger, terror... Everything that unfolds in characterizations, in ecstasy, in survival, in the occurrence of living in an "incongruous world." We have never been such "Kafkaesque beetles" as we are now. And in a world surrounded by networks and technology, books bring us closer to the collective imagination that ChatGPT is trying to invade.
Through the simplicity and letters of books, we travel to where we have never been, we go through the sorrows of those we were or never were. I live surrounded by friends, I'm lucky. All my shelves speak. I open the mailbox and find a new member for my club, a new brother. When I open his first page I will know that he will be talking about me and also about you.