The Retreat Prophecy

The best thing about the Book Fair is its anachronism.

The Book Fair is as anachronistic as bicycles, as trams, as the habit of walking to errands and shopping, chatting with a friend, or finding love in the real world and not on the streets. social networks, or to cool the house by closing doors and curtains and favoring air currents.

The Book Fair is an anachronism in the same way that a concert can be where the sound is not electronically amplified, or where silent concentration has to be maintained for half an hour or an hour and with a bit of luck you will not hear the music of a telephone.

The Book Fair is as anachronistic as the books themselves, printed with physical ink on paper,

in the same cellulose from which the trunks of the trees that surround it and give it shade are made, and from which sometimes a comforting breeze comes to the booths in the heat of Madrid, as well as a murmur of leaves and songs of birds that can only be heard in the rare moments of silence, when they are not covered by the claims of the loudspeakers or the clamor of the crowd that strolls festively and anachronistically chooses books by not looking at them on a screen and pressing with the tips of their fingers. fingers, but by touching them with their hands, exchanging comments and various forms of payment with vendors who have a presence as radical as they are, made of voices and looks, the pure magnet of physical closeness.

The Book Fair is so anachronistic that even authors appear in it in person,

Books, streetcars, walks, shopping in a store where you are attended by a human being, belong to a particular category of anachronism: that of things that seem to belong to the past and suddenly it turns out that what they belong to is to the future, although not to the one decreed by those experts who suddenly appear armed with a poise and ease in their predictions that give them an immediate air of infallibility.

The advantage of gaining some temporal perspective—of getting old, in other words—is that one has already witnessed a few times cycles of authoritative prediction and consequent failure, of more or less utopian promises and disastrous results.

The urban orthodoxy that prevailed in our early youth was that of wide avenues open to cars,

the one of the sharp separation between the spaces of commerce and economic activity and the residential ones.

I once heard the architect Sáenz de Oiza say, in a public act, that television screens were more important than windows to look out on the world, and that the future of cities lay in following the example of Los Angeles.

We have seen the elimination of streetcars and tree-lined boulevards celebrated as successes of modernity, and we have heard the same prophecies enunciated by left-wing utopians and by propagandists of the abolition of all limits to the market economy.

I remember a severely Marxist friend who once censured me as petty bourgeois and retrograde for my defense of small businesses against the big shopping malls: apparently,

14 or 15 years ago, at the time I bought the first Kindle, the paper book seemed doomed to rapid extinction, just like paper newspapers, and publishers, and the modest aspirations of writers, musicians, and artists to receive the fruit of their work, and not by way of alms or official subsidy, but by reasonable payment made by those who freely enjoy it, also benefiting from that other knowledge and professional skills that support creative tasks: booksellers, printers, distributors, technicians of all kinds.

It was the golden age of the experts in technological futurism, of the prophets of freedom understood as the unpunished exercise of piracy, although with certain curious limits: they never asked for free Internet connections,

Nothing gets old faster than the future.

The future, 10 or 15 years ago, was the electronic book, just as the CD-Rom had been a little earlier, whose novelty is only remembered by people of a certain age.

The future was those overpasses to multiply traffic, as obsolete now as its name, Scalextric: now it turns out that bike lanes have a much better future, and that the city in which we want to live and in which we can do so without poisoning our lungs is that of the superblocks open to commerce and civic coexistence, the city of the quarter of an hour, the city on a human scale in which we can meet a friend on the street and are not in danger of being run over when crossing a zebra crossing .

And there will be no greater urban conquest than the return of a spectacle so anachronistic that we only see it in black and white photos: boys and girls playing in the street.

Now we watch old movies and we are surprised that people smoked so much in them, in the past that they portray, which is the one in which many of us live and remember.

I am sure that in the not too distant future, people will be so surprised to see images of cities full of cars.

The future of 10 or 15 years ago is now: we also feared then that the predictions would come true, that tangible books would disappear, and with them the readers who wanted to buy them and give them away, to obtain an author's signature, with a date that certifies a memory.

Now it turns out that printed books are as practical as bicycles, and almost as healthy, as valuable for citizens as the Retiro Park.

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