*Wrote Franz Kafka on January 27, 1904: “we need books that have on us the effect of a very painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like an exile in forests far from any human being, like a suicide; A book must be an ax to drive into the frozen sea within us. That’s what I think”. (EL PAÍS, Babelia, May 4, 2024).
**Wrote Eduardo Parody in THE COUNTRY on March 9, 2024: “Why have you not organized yourself in all this time and claimed, with brutal determination, that to build a healthy society, most of the daily waking time cannot be taken by work, but by children? (or whatever you want)?”
And I believe that both of them say similar things at different and eternal times. We do not know if reading should be what sustains Kafka: we believe that it exaggerates: the enormous number of readers fully accounts for specimens of all types, classes and conditions; and trying to offer a classification seems like a truly impossible task. On the other hand, time is hidden from us too often and, lately, big technology companies are determined to steal from us. the lost time: we spend the best hours of the day working and producing; I don’t know if we are living: we want to believe so. It is true that each one leads his own existence as God makes him understand. But the fact of knowing different and diverse opinions is something like entering another dimension: there are always people who offer us their varied points of view and, the truth is, they do not leave us indifferent, even if that was not their initial intention.
In these times of constant information manipulation, it is fortunate that there are people with judgment (sometimes, they return from the past) who make us feel that the reading and the time They are the same thing. The fact that opinions are maintained with more than a century of distance between them is fortunate that serves to make it clear that time is an entelechy, that there have always been sensible and simple thinkers and opinion members, where the clearest everyday life is accentuated. in a park where the kids don’t stop running and jumping. And the recurring hubbub.
And all this is relevant because a few of us have the habit of reading, of saving the news that makes us think for a time later, when the time comes, trying to pour into it, or alongside it, the particular vision of this passionate writer. I don’t know if I explain myself.
Juan FERRERA GIL
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