Books
Opening a book is observing the world and traveling from one land to another in search of its smells, colors and flavors. In the first paragraph of the story of Metamorfosis, we see Gregorio Samsa turned into a huge insect unable to move from his bed, scared of his transformation. Franz Kafka wanted to explore the human soul through the mind of a horrified man locked inside a body that is no longer his. The shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe had to rise from his shipwreck and invent words in solitude, overcome his tragic destiny. Captain Ahab in Moby Dick chased a whale that had torn off his leg, he did not overcome the limits of his body and an eternal revenge remained in him that led to his death. In the Bible we witness the murder of Abel by his brother Cain, which is the homicidal instinct of the human being.
Only those who have read a book can experience different ages and moments in history. To preserve the written word, the Egyptians invented papyrus extracted from a plant that grew in the depths of the Nile River, the Greeks invented parchment from the skin of an animal in the city of Pergamon, the Chinese made rice paper to write their symbols. . The first epic in the history of humanity is the Gilgamesh of the Sumerians who lived in the city of Uruk in modern-day Iraq. One of the characters in this story was a king named Enkidu who wanted to be immortal.
Thanks to a clay tablet written in Arcadian and found in modern-day Iraq, we were able to read the story of Gilgamesh.
The world without books would be a sad place, it would be a place without words and without history. Johannes Gutenberg multiplied books by creating the printing press in 1440 in what is now Germany. With this great advance, many copies of important works were made and deposited in libraries. This is a great advance by the Ptolemies when they created the library of Alexandria in Egypt and took advantage of papyrus to record many works.
Without books we would not have known the city of Troy, nor the Trojan horse, nor Ulysses’ journey to Ithaca. In the Sahara I learned to write on a wooden board made from the trunk of an acacia, my teacher wrote with an inkwell pencil dipped in charcoal and grease. This is how I learned to recite my first poems in Hasanía. I remember that in each tent camp the teacher was surrounded by ancient manuscripts written on soft, tanned leather.
Thus, humanity has been curing ignorance, that terrible disease, through books and reading. The triumph of reason and enlightenment in Europe are born in the human mind through the written word. The Granada poet Federico García Lorca said in his town Fuente Vaqueros on April 23 regarding the book:
“Books! Books. Here he uses a magic word that is equivalent to saying “love, love,” and that the people must ask for as they ask for bread or as they long for rain for their crops. When the famous Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, father of the Russian revolution much more than Lenin, was a prisoner in Siberia, far from the world, between four walls and surrounded by desolate plains of endless snow, and he asked for help in a letter to his distant family, only He said: “Send me books, books, many books so that my soul does not die!” He was cold and did not ask for fire, he was thirsty and did not ask for water, he asked for books, that is, horizons, that is, stairs to climb the summit and the heart. Because the physical, biological, natural agony of a body due to hunger, thirst or cold lasts little, very little, but the agony of the unsatisfied soul lasts a lifetime.”
