Imposed the quarantine, asks for a new reflection that old song that Carlos Lico sang where he affirmed that "all those days that I spend with you, they seem like Sunday ... they seem like Sunday". In the first place, because of the change of lyrics assumed by an immense majority that would have to sing with me instead of with you and then, because of that rare changing and variable property that distinguishes Sunday: for some days of prayer and rest, for others - many —A day equal to Wednesday, which sometimes seems like an extended Saturday or an early Monday.
As the plague passes, the desire of thousands to read all the books they have postponed over the years is becoming more and more widespread, and social networks are flooded with friendly invitations to virtual visits to the great museums. Opportunities to listen to all the symphonies and concerts that fit in the following weeks of confinement proliferate and some - minority - enroll in online courses certified by famous prestigious universities. In addition to reiterating that this is an unlimited vacation or fun vacation, many souls assume working from home, attending virtual classes, meeting on screen, working from afar.
For those who try to invent stories or live novels, inhabiting tales, life is more or less as monastic as it is now imposed on the rest of mortals. Locking up reading novels from cover to cover, sitting down to invent a landscape with their respective characters, looking for a twist to the plots or making credible invented dialogues is precisely the pulp from which the writer's trades are made. The convoluted schedules, the routine before the blank notebooks or the flickering screen and the constant wandering through the shelves - wooden or electronic - of the libraries and archives, of the paragraphs and pages, is precisely the galaxy that the traveler usually travels in prose or the verse navigator or the chronicler of the past and yes, indeed, even if the months that are weeks go by the hermit misses the walks, the even solitary gathering of the cafes and the life itself that that always happens there and outside, but it is striking that a thorough survey is not needed to confirm that an immense majority of neighbors and close ones suffer the pandemic with a true torture because they are no longer readers nor have the slightest desire or willingness to narrate - on paper or silence. - the novel as a life preserver, the even tedious everyday story that one has to narrate oneself in order not to roam in the void or drown in the tried.
It is evident that the vast majority depend on the meager information offered by electronic portals and can survive this and any catastrophe with the placebo of memes, the global sharing of jokes and gossip, the beating of long free calls by the work and grace of the same network, but far from the true unappealable source for our salvation: the books, the reading that is in books, the books that protect the now forbidden time of caress and kiss and the books that preserve memory; books where there is so much imaginable and unimaginable that all this that we live from the balcony seems to have already been written by a marvelous madman between the walls of a cell lit by a candle. Sacred books that have the word of God in at least three versions and verses and books that record the laws more or less shared by all humanity or books that record the symptoms and possible remedies for all ills or books that portray plants and they speak in low voices of all the animals, even the extinct ones; books that speak of the impalpable and of trips to the moon, of nerves due to absence and of hugs without fear ... books at hand, at the fingertips that enlarge this screen or on the phalanx that stops the next page , about to spend like someone opening the window for another morning of quarantine or lent or the healing that must come with the possible utopia that we all wake up from this nightmare with the habit of reading the most contagious-shared ... and a respectful notion that the silent vocation of those who choose to live in ink, locked in their paragraphs, trying to draw outstanding characters or read and re-read incandescent examples of the literary greatness of others with the heroic or foolish desire to write, write for read, read and be read beyond the confinement that requires silence and solitude, precisely because we are together.
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