I’ve been
wondering for years about the brain of someone who doesn’t read. What
encourages such a brain to think through time and carry on 24 hours a day, for
a whole existence? How are the walls inside this brain? How does it feed
itself? Once I heard Fernando Savater saying that the brain of a person that
doesn’t read, or barely reads, must probably look like an “empty attic,” in
which slowly and silently a thick and dying dust takes over like a complete darkness.
There is a letter from Kafka to Max
Brod in which The Metamorphosis’
author punches the subject harder and better, he says <<If the book that we are
reading doesn’t shake our heads with a shove, why do we bother to read it? We
need books that affect our lives as a catastrophe would do, books hurting deep
and hard, like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, books that make us
feel exiled in a forest far from everyone, like suicide. A book should be the
axe to face the frozen sea throbbing inside ourselves.>> Kafka, like Savater
many years later, thinks about a brain that doesn’t read as a cold place,
inhospitable, illuminated by a dull light.
But, what if it isn’t that way?
Often times we are tempted to think that the real damaged and absented brain is
precisely the one that reads. After all, I don’t know people whose brains remain very tranquil, in peace, after reading a good book. There’s something so-called “curiosity” in these brains causing continuous tribulations; these kind of people are unable to
sleep well without a book at hand. People that live establishing quotidian
contact with literature accumulate anxieties, vital holes, broken nights, unknown
questions… Sooner or later these people are unsure about everything, holding on
to doubts and constantly facing a personal ostracism that forces them to move on
to another book, and this takes place day by day. This movement becomes perpetual, and
the reader remains for life defeated in front of himself, because books are, in
a sense, very powerful enemies.
In April of 2000, during his last
trip to Chile, Roberto Bolaño confessed to a journalist from The Latest News that <<writers are good
for nothing. Literature is useless. Literature is only useful to literature
itself.>> And Bolaño concluded by saying that <<for me that is enough.>> In his theory, a person
decides to become a writer <<in an instant of total insanity,>> and one good day
what that person wrote ends in front of someone reading also in a gesture of
total insanity. Literature, said the author of 2666 in a different interview, grows over collisions and disasters.
And only in that place Literature is happy, surrounded by its own sickness, which happens to provide to some kind of people a
lot of company. Nothing is more uncomfortable for people that read than the “apparent” comfort
that the person that never reads conveys.
The place of readers is one lacking comfort, the gale, the feeling of inner disorder. The popular Spanish writer Iñaki Uriarte tells in his
diaries that he has a friend that reads, of the kind that read to feel sick and pessimistic, and that always arrive late to the appointments. Uriarte recalls that once he waited for his friend one hour and a half, and when
he finally showed up, he justify his tardiness arguing that <<Kafka always arrived
late to his appointments.>> Uriarte reproached him that he had just invented
that citation, that it wasn’t true, but then his friend replied that <<Faulkner
was also a great liar.>> Perhaps reading is useful to establish this kind of
dialogues. Dialogues that are ephemeral but dazzling.
Here you can find the original text in Spanish:
http://descartemoselrevolver.com/2015/05/09/que-hay-en-una-cabeza-que-no-lee/
translated from the original in Spanish by Francisco Laguna-Correa
