At my age, I’m almost 50 years old, I should have already read everything necessary to settle on the person I want to be. Instead, I’ve read adrift. Like a branch severed from the trunk, falling down the course of a river, I get hooked here or there on the books that fall into my hands. Most of them barely stain me, they don’t even keep me warm.
The current drags me towards something new, it throws me a Christmas gift, I receive a promotional mailing from a publisher. At the bottom of my shelves, which have three lines like three substrates for the evolution of life, is all that paper that I bought in used bookstores, again or in Cuesta de Moyano when I could still afford to choose objects by the cover. Some I even half-read.
Almost all of these volumes have a bookplate with my name, a date, and a note of where it was purchased, what other things happened that day, or how I was feeling. These marks confirm that the context was more important than the text.
Every reader knows that unread books form an ocean infinitely, cosmically, larger than those read. The latter are a drop, insignificant, misplaced in that immensity. At first it doesn’t matter so much; life is about to be navigated. Over the years, this disproportion becomes a pressure in the chest, an anxiety that prevents turning the page. You’re going to die and you haven’t read the little list you wrote at 18 with the essential readings for before you’re 20. Of those, you crossed out two, and you don’t even remember them anymore.
We don’t remember the books but the important thing is to affirm, without lying, that we have already read that. We would have to reread them, but how much time would that task take away from the perpetual sentence of drilling, minimally, the gigantic rock of all those books that I have not read and will not read?
Now, in a new book I no longer write anything in case when reading, gently, the first 20 pages, I decide to give it as a gift. But if I get to the end, I write the date on the last page. I no longer care about the circumstances in which a book came into my life, only the evidence that I have managed, as if crowning an ultra-prominent peak, to reach the end. In case one day I forget that too.
In a book I like its straight lines, its white margins, its page numbers. It is a basic order in which I feel safe. I like to fall asleep reading and not take off my glasses, that the book is heavy and rests, wide open, on my chest and warms me like a blanket does. Almost always, the background noise of reading is so powerful that it is difficult for me to move forward, I frequently get stuck on a line and repeat it over and over again, like when the handle catches the sleeve and then you no longer know what it is. You were going to search that room.
Leo raising his head. I write mentally while my eyes look at the words. I correct the writer, I look for spelling mistakes. I do not fall through the cracks between the lines nor do they trap me like bars of a narrative that imprisons me. Only sometimes.
