Italo Calvino said that “the aspect in which hugging and reading are most similar is that inside them they open up times and spaces that are different from measurable time and space.” A hug, that sensation of clasping and being clasped in arms, that fusion that goes far beyond bodies.
They embrace each other in a reunion and in a farewell; She embraces herself with joy, with pain, with resignation, with hope. She hugs herself to say everything that words cannot name because that hug contains them all. Hugs to give comfort or strength; It is embraced as the ultimate, finished and perfect expression of love.
There are hugs
“of those that do not only squeeze the body but of those that are capable of sustaining doubts and fears
,” as the Spaniard Eloy Moreno said. That gesture that barely requires a pair of willing arms has even been rescued by science: hugging is good for your health. They talk about the release of oxytocin, precisely called the love hormone, and even how a hug can help lower blood pressure. They are so important that you can even buy them.
The business took off years ago in the United States, when for US$80 per hour or US$400 for the entire night, clients eager to be embraced in a restorative hug received them in private homes. Then free huggers appeared in strategic places like the Golden Gate in San Francisco on New Year's Eve and things became professional, a matter of hiring them as another service.
It's a palliative, of course. It will never be able to compete with the
“embrace me in your wings so that another air does not touch me but your breath, from which I live and die”
, proposed by Antonio Gala.