Solitude on a tightrope

As I said before, my life consists of reading and everything related to books. So, reading and writing are the two things I not only enjoy but I love to do. There are many ways to undertake these tasks, but the one I enjoy the most is the one that is done in the solitude of my library, which actually has a name and it is My Aleph. I can say, absolutely thankful and fortunate, I am happy doing these activities every single day.

Even though reading and writing are different activities, they are complementary. For me, one doesn’t coexist without the other. I think reading feeds writing and vice versa. They are, in literature, the fundamental pillars, and so, I see them as a dialectics, ludic and disturbing.

Reading, as author Paul Auster says, “is essentially loneliness”. “It is written in solitude” and “it is read in solitude” he holds. In this way, the few things a person needs to conquer reading are the texts, calm and imagination to recreate the huge universes that remain inside the books. Thus, I will say that reading is a journey that takes only one ticket to ride.

Writing, for its part, is a big and great risk that whoever takes it must be responsible for. Related to this, the well-known writer Harlan Ellison holds the idea of writing as a “dangerous undertaking”, in which the discovery of oneself entails something “that is too terrible to bear”, and so it means, he says, that “one will walk forever on the tightrope”. It is a hard, outspoken and not easy line to apprehend; for I believe, it involves being thoughtful, critic and reflective on the paper after learning in books.

So, my suggestion will always be do both things, reading first, writing then. The possibilities a human can find in it are unimaginable. And so it is, if someone were to ask me if these projects are expensive, I would say they are, even when this could not involve a dime. As Jorge Luis Borges could say, the most important thing you need in order to be a reader or a writer is emotion. Therefore, I will conclude: If you can feel, you can read and you can write.