The movement that we appreciate on earth is essentially based on two inventions of the human spirit: movement in space is based on the invention of the wheel, which rotates vertically around its axis, and intellectual movement is directly related to the discovery of the writing. At some point, somewhere, an anonymous human being came up with the idea of bending hard wood, bending it, and turning it into a wheel. Thanks to this pioneer, humanity learned to overcome the distance that separates peoples and countries. Suddenly it was possible to get in contact with other people by means of vehicles that allowed to transport merchandise, travel to acquire new knowledge and end the restrictions imposed by nature, which limited the obtaining of fruits, minerals, precious stones and others. products to areas where weather conditions were favorable.
Countries no longer lived in isolation, they now established links with the rest of the world. East and West, North and South, East and West gradually approached, as we devised new means of transportation. The development of the technique has endowed the wheel with very sophisticated shapes — the locomotive that drags the cars of a train, the cars that run at full speed or the ships and planes powered by the rotation of their propellers — with which we shorten distances and we overcome the force of gravity; in the same way, writing, which has evolved from the simplest sheets, through the scrolls, to culminate in the book, has ended the tragic confinement of experiences and experiences in the individual soul: since the book exists No one is completely alone anymore, with no other perspective than that offered by their own point of view, since they have at their fingertips the present and the past, the thinking and feeling of all humanity. In our world today, any intellectual movement is backed by a book; in fact, those conventions that elevate us above the material, which we call culture, would be unthinkable without their presence.
For us children and grandchildren of centuries of writing, reading has become another vital function, an automatic activity, and the book, which they put in our hands on the first day of school, is perceived as something natural
The power of the book to expand the soul, to build the world and to articulate our personal life, our intimacy, usually goes unnoticed except on rare occasions, and when we become aware of its importance, we do not manifest it either. The book has long since become a matter of course, an everyday object whose wonderful qualities arouse neither our amazement nor our gratitude. In the same way that we are not aware of the oxygen that we introduce into our body every time we breathe, nor of the mysterious chemical processes with which our blood takes advantage of this invisible food, neither do we notice the spiritual matter that our eyes absorb and nourishes (or weakens). our intellect continuously.
For us children and grandchildren of centuries of writing, reading has become another vital function, an automatic, almost physical activity, and the book, which they put in our hands on the first day of school, is perceived as something natural, something that it always accompanies us, it is part of our environment, and that is why most of the time we open it with the same indifference, with the same reluctance with which we take our jacket, our gloves, a cigarette or any other object of consumption of the that are mass-produced for the masses. Any item, however valuable it may be, is treated with disdain when it can be easily obtained, and only in the most creative moments of our lives, when we reflect, when we turn to inner contemplation, do we achieve what has become common and current again amazing. In those rare moments of reflection we look at it with respect and we are aware of the magic that it breathes into our soul, of the force that it projects on our life, of the importance that today, in the 20th century, the book has, to the point of not being able to imagine our inner world without the miracle of its existence.
Although these moments are so rare, precisely for this reason they usually remain in our memories for a long time, often for years. So, for example, I continue to remember with complete accuracy the place, the day and the time when that subtle intuition arose within me that led me to understand that our inner world is weaving with that other visible world and, at the same time, invisible from books. I do not think it is a lack of modesty to tell how this spiritual revelation took place in me, because, although it is a personal experience, that memorable and revealing episode far transcends the individual himself. At that time, he must have been about twenty-six years old, he had already written some books, so he knew to a certain extent the mysterious transformation that a dream undergoes, an awkwardly conceived fantasy, and the various phases it goes through until, after curious distillations and decantations, it ends up transforming into that rectangular object of paper and cardboard that we call a book, that venal product, to which we assign a price and that we place as another commodity behind the glass of a showcase, as if it had no soul, when In fact, each copy, even if it is bought and sold, is a lively being, endowed with will, who meets those who leaf through it out of curiosity, those who end up reading it and, above all, those who not only read it , but also enjoy it.
Thus, I had already experienced in the first person, at least in part, that ineffable process similar to a transfusion with which we get a few drops of our own being to begin to circulate through the veins of another person, a transfer from destination to destination , from feeling to feeling, from spirit to spirit; However, the magic, the passion and the transcendence of the printed letter, its true essence, had not been openly revealed to me, I had limited myself to vaguely reflect on it, but I had not thought it through, I had not drawn the due conclusions. That was what I understood that day thanks to the anecdote that I am going to relate.
He was then traveling on a boat, an Italian ship with which he was traveling the Mediterranean Sea, from Genoa to Naples, from Naples to Tunis and from there to Algiers. The journey was to last several days and the ship was practically empty. That being the case, she used to talk often with a young Italian man who was part of the crew, a waiter who did not even have the rank of a waiter, since she was in charge of sweeping the cabins, scrubbing the deck and performing It was nice to see that boy work, a splendid, dark-haired boy with black eyes, with dazzling teeth that shone every time he laughed. And how much he liked to laugh! I loved listening to his melodious and graceful Italian, a music that he always accompanied with lively gestures. He had a natural talent for capturing people's gestures and imitating them, making formidable caricatures: the captain, babbling with his toothless mouth; the old English gentleman walking the deck as stiff as a club, putting his left shoulder a little forward; the cook, dignified and proud, who after dinner boasted in front of the passengers and had a clinical eye to judge the people he had filled the belly. I had fun chatting with that dark-haired, feral boy with a glowing forehead and tattooed arms, who for many years, he told me, had been caring for sheep on the Aeolian Islands, his home, a kind and trusting person like a puppy . It didn't take long for him to realize that I was fond of him and that there was no one on the entire ship that I liked talking to as much as he did. So he told me a lot of details about his life, frankly, with total ease, so that after a couple of days we were dealing with the camaraderie of two friends.
Then, overnight, an invisible wall rose between him and me. We had landed in Naples, the ship had been filled with coal, passengers, vegetables and mail, its usual diet in each port, and then it had gone back to sea. The elegant neighborhood of Posillipo had lowered its head in humility until it was lost on the horizon, among the hills, and the clouds that surrounded the top of Vesuvius looked like the pale wisps of cigarette smoke. Then he suddenly appeared, grinning from ear to ear, standing in front of me and proudly showing me a crumpled letter he had just received, asking me to read it.
He kept pondering what had just happened. For the first time I had come face-to-face with an illiterate, with a European as well, a person who had seemed intelligent to me and with whom I had spoken as with a friend. How was the world reflected in a brain like yours, which did not know writing?
At first I had a hard time understanding what he wanted from me. I thought that Giovanni had received a letter in a language he didn't understand, French or German, surely from a girl — it was obvious that he must have been very successful among the girls — and that he had come looking for me to translate it for him. But no, the letter was written in Italian. What did you want then? That he read it to me? Nothing of that. What he wanted is for her to read it to him, he had to know what that letter said. And, suddenly, I understood what was happening: that intelligent boy, of statuesque beauty, endowed with grace and a true talent for human treatment, was part of that seven or eight percent of Italians who, according to statistics, did not they know how to read: he was illiterate. I started thinking and that's when I realized that I had never met anyone like him, a specimen of an endangered species across Europe. Until I met Giovanni, I had not met any European who could not read. I guess I just stared at him in amazement. I no longer saw him as a friend or as a comrade, but as a rarity. Then, naturally, I read him the letter. A dressmaker had written it for him, I don't remember if his name was Maria or Carolina. He told what young women tell young people in all countries and in all the languages of the world. As she read it to him, she didn't take her eyes off my lips for a single moment. It was obvious that he struggled to retain every word. He was frowning with all his attention listening, his face loosening trying to remember each phrase. I read the letter to him twice, slowly, clearly, so that he could keep it in memory. He was looking more and more pleased: his eyes were radiant and his mouth bloomed like a red rose when summer came. Then one of the ship's officers appeared, approached the gunwale, and Giovanni had no choice but to leave.
This was what happened. But the authentic experience, the one that was going to transform me inside, had only just begun. I stretched out on a lounger and let my sight fade into the darkness of that peaceful night. She kept pondering what had just happened. For the first time I had come face-to-face with an illiterate, with a European as well, a person who had seemed intelligent to me and with whom I had spoken as with a friend. That idea haunted me. How was the world reflected in a brain like yours, which did not know writing? I tried to imagine the situation. What would not knowing how to read be like? For a moment I put myself in that boy's place. Pick up a newspaper and don't understand it. He takes a book, holds it in his hands, notices that it is somewhat lighter than wood or iron, has a rectangular shape, touches its edges, its corners, observes its color, but none of this has to do with its purpose, so he leaves it again, because he doesn't know what to do with it. He stops before the window of a bookstore and stares at the beautiful specimens, yellow, green, red, white, all rectangular, all with gold prints on the spine, but it is as if he were in front of a still life whose fruits he cannot enjoy. , before well-closed perfume bottles whose aroma is confined within the glass.
People mention Goethe, Dante, Shelley, sacred names that say nothing to him, they are dead syllables, empty voices, meaningless. The poor man does not even imagine the dazzling charm that can hide any of the lines of a book, whose brilliance can only be compared to the silver glow reflected by the moon when it breaks a cluster of fading clouds, he does not know the deep commotion that Experimenting when verifying that the fate of the protagonist of a story has become part of our own life almost without us realizing it. As he does not know the book, he lives locked inside insurmountable walls, deaf to any claim, like a troglodyte. How can you support such a life, knowing that between us and the universe an insurmountable gap opens, without drowning, without impoverishing yourself? How does one bear the only thing that he can come to know is what happens by chance to his eyes, to his ears? How can you breathe without the universal air that comes from books? These were the questions I asked myself. I tried my best to imagine the existence of someone who cannot read, who has been excluded from the intellectual world, I strove to artificially reconstruct their way of life just as a scholar tries to reconstruct the way of life of a brachycephalic or a man from the Stone Age from the remains of a lake site. But I couldn't get into the head of a man, of a European, who has never read a book. I think it is a company doomed to failure, as well as getting a deaf person to get an idea of how wonderful music is, no matter how much we talk about it.
Encounters with books . Stefan Zweig. Knut Beck edition. Translation by Roberto Bravo de la Varga. Cliff, 2020. 272 pages. 22 euros.