cries the pen

As of this writing, Salman Rushdie is still in surgery, wounded in the abdomen and neck with a knife that had been sharpening for years.

I don't want to know the name of the insane attacker or the details of his daring delusion;

I just hope that the anesthesia allows Rushdie to imagine new plots and characters that he will jell into his next novel or essay.

I also wish – foolishly – that the episode ceases to be a tragedy and becomes a true warning of the unforgivable seriousness that any attack on freedom of expression, on the illumination of the intangible, entails.

That is to say, what we call Literature with a capital letter and which is –engraved on stone, paper or screen– the only thing that saves us.

Just yesterday a madman died dejected for trying to immolate himself in defense of the already proven criminal, clown and pretender Donald Trump, and daily we are harassed by bombardments of terrifying stupidity, unleashed lies, stormy violence and other misfortunes, but that has reached the jugular of an author the dagger unsheathed more than three decades ago by the religious fanaticism of a maddened populace (who, without reading it, already condemned it) is an inevitable proof of the barbarism that persists in this world.

The same world that 30 years ago had neither mobile phones nor the Internet, just ATMs and faxes that retired telexes.

That world where the life of a writer changed forever.

Now, read it!

Now more than before: read it!

Those who have already done it: reread it!, as a vigil and tribute, encouragement and confirmation that there is no weapon that defeats the magical universe of Literature.

exhortation

,

to suppose that putting a book in the hands of criminals –

—the bloody climate and the unleashed criminality vanish forever;

No!

I say that it is necessary to read and reread precisely because there are terrorists and religious leaders who decree the fatwa for the verses they have read, for the Sacred Book that they carry as a mistaken justification for Death.

You have to read Rushdie to know a scholar without pedantry, a prose illuminated by the grace of humor (not clowning).

He is a writer who has been concerned with understanding the bridges that cross the distances between cultures and landscapes... a voracious reader whose essays are pure walking thought, pure and simple, and an unforgettable smile that at this moment only deserves silence.

Excuse the blur, the screen seems to be flooded because the pen is crying.

Let all the feathers cry at this heated moment when the hypnotic voice and the quasi-

gaze of a bard illuminate the night like shooting stars, like Perseids in the black night of dementia where better days have to be fertilized precisely with the dripping of ink salty with which one only tries to underline admiration and gratitude for all the writers and so many authors who give their soul in each paragraph of their stories and in each verse of their paragraphs, the pentagram of the lines where the heart rhythm of a man floats letters, syllables and sounds of silence that should never have suffered the slightest irrational harassment or the present attack for having curdled the high pleasure of writing.

'Cry my pen'Jorge F. Hernández

subscribe here

to the

of EL PAÍS México and receive all the informative keys of the current affairs of this country

50% off

Subscribe to continue reading

read without limits

Keep reading

I'm already a subscriber