Read or listen?

The journalist Alma Guillermoprieto, in Madrid in May 2017, when she won the Ortega y Gasset Award for Professional Career.

Just a few days ago, dear reader, in the middle of one of those Byzantine discussions that are, among other things, because no one can claim reason as theirs —is it okay to listen to audiobooks or is doing so betraying reading?—, I remembered by Alma Guillermoprieto, who must be one of the best chroniclers of our time.

—If you have not read Guillermoprieto, I ask you to please do yourself the favor of obtaining, as soon as possible,

or

in addition to which I challenge you, if they read one of these three books, not to read, afterwards, with fervor and pleasure, the rest of his work, a work that condenses, in each text, what we mistakenly assume as different virtues: sensitivity and intelligence , for example, as well as intuition and listening.

I remembered Guillermoprieto, he said, because a long time ago, during another of those dead-end Byzantine discussions, at the time when electronic books flourished and at after-dinners and cafes where there were one or more editors, one or more writers or one or various booksellers debated absurd terrors —Plato, when it occurred to someone that the copyist might not be one but ten, trembled and declared that this was the end of culture—, while figures danced that could only be the product of Imagination of some insane marketer or, worse, of the marketing manager of some transnational conglomerate, who usually knows so much about so many things that unfortunately are never literature, scratching the tablecloth with his teaspoon and smiling, he said: “Well as I like to read,I don't care what the lyrics are on."

Listen as reading mode

But he was saying that the discussion that the other day led me to remember that other one to which Guillermoprieto abruptly ended, as if his words, words that he obviously launched without having to raise his voice, were a guillotine —it's curious, but now, when writing this word, I think it comes in handy to talk about the style of the Mexican writer and journalist, who usually does that in her best texts: guillotining, with overwhelming subtlety, to expose the jugular, marrow, or spine of a situation, a story or a profiled subject-, it was not about the opposition paper book against electronic book but about that other matter that, suddenly, in recent times, seems to have taken over all the after-dinners and coffees in which there is one or several publishers, one or several writers, or one or several booksellers:the opposition between books and audiobooks, that is, between a paper book or an electronic book (the enemies have suddenly gone over to the same side) and a book on an audio file.

In the middle of that discussion, which in some way is also —or should be, to aspire, at least, to become interesting— about the different modes of intimacy and the encounter of two or more intimacies, while thinking, then, that what should make us discuss, in reality, the social dimension of reading, because just as before, centuries or even more ago, those who did not know how to read accessed the texts through the voice of those who did know, it is undeniable that today, for hundreds of thousands of readers, not to say millions, the real conditions do not give rise to, do not allow, well, even if one knows how to read, access to something as basic as a space and a time worthy of reading —the majority of those who defend at all costs to the printed book they can dedicate, exclusively, one or several hours of their time each day,In addition to the fact that they can choose if they do it, that is, if they read in a more or less comfortable chair, what I thought or what I asked myself, rather, if it is not contradictory to fight with a way of reading that, in the end, is also the way through which we all accessed it.

At the origin, the voice

Before we knew how to read, before the written word transmitted an idea, an emotion, or a feeling to us directly —it doesn't matter if that transmission happened through a poem, a fable, or a story—, most of us —perhaps not I can assert that all of them, but I can assert what I have just said: that the infinite majority of readers who today count ourselves as that, that is, as readers—we acceded to that spell, the spell of the written word, Through someone else's voice.

What I want to say, then, is that that first idea, that first emotion or that first feeling that the written word offered us was given to us through the language, through the reading aloud by a father, a mother, a brother , a sister, a teacher, a teacher, the manager or the manager of a library...

You have to have a devastated memory, I thought then, so as not to remember how marvelous that moment was, of all those moments in which we were read or, rather, having had a father, a mother, a brother, a sister, a professor, a shitty professor... And I also thought, following Guillermoprieto, whom I remembered, as I already said, while the Byzantine discussion hijacked the after-dinner: like me, what I really like is the spell of the word written, I don't care if I read it or they read it to me —as long as, of course, whoever reads it knows how to pronounce even the silence of the spell.

As will surely happen to Guillermoprieto, who, beyond his phrase, will have a predilection, not a conditioning factor —"I want to read this book on paper" is not the same as "all the books I read should be on paper"—, my Predilection is for the printed word, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying an audiobook —yes, I hope the industry understands that a professional reader is not the same as a vitacilin advertiser.

In other words, that my predilection makes me say: I want to read this book, is not the same as saying: I want to read all the books that I approach.

Above all, it is not the same as saying: since this is how I read, this is how the world should read.

And it is not the same because writing and reading were, are and will be, luckily, an encounter, a social event as well as an intimate one.

Especially in Latin America, where conditions, beyond Byzantine clashes, are what they are.