praise of reading and fiction - Mario Vargas Llosa  |
| "In Peru I take him in the belly because he was born, grew up, I trained, I lived those experiences of childhood and youth that shaped my personality, forged my vocation, and because there loved, hated, rejoiced, and I had dreamed. " |
share this time the speech of Mario Vargas Llosa. A lesson of love, patriotism, loyalty, freedom, democracy, recognition, gratitude, excellence. A compliment of reading and fiction, as indicated by the title. this speech, Vargas Llosa celebrates his teachers, his wife Patricia and children, to Arequipa, Piura, Leoncio Prado to school, to Arguedas to Peru, "all the blood" to Spain, France and the friends of all parties, defends democracy, freedom, cosmopolitanism; condemnation complaint and repudiates all forms of fanaticism, religion and nationalism. A room full of reflections literary, political, full of reading and learning that can reflect with every sentence he uttered.
Here we leave the full speech:
praise of reading and fiction
I learned to read at age five in the class of Justinian brother at the College de la Salle, in Cochabamba (Bolivia). It is the most important thing that happened to me in life. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how that magic translate words into images of the books, enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space and allowing me to travel with Captain Nemo twenty thousand leagues under the sea, fighting alongside d 'Artagnan, Athos, Porthos and Aramis against the intrigues that threaten the Queen at the time of winding Richelieu, or crawl through the bowels of Paris, became Jean Valjean, with the lifeless body of Marius in tow.
Reading turned the dream life and dream life and put the scope of the piece of man that I was the universe of literature. My mother told me that the first things I wrote were continuations of the stories I read as I was sorry and wanted to finish amending the end. And perhaps that's what I've spent my life doing without knowing it: for long time, growing up, maturing and growing old, the stories that filled my childhood with excitement and adventure.
I wish my mother were here, she used to get excited and mourn reading the poems by Amado Nervo and Pablo Neruda, and his grandfather Pedro, big nose and bald head gleaming, celebrating my verses, and Uncle Lucho both encouraged me to turn over body and soul to write but the literature at that time and place, so ill fed to its practitioners. All my life I had with me and people who loved and encouraged me, and I spread his faith when he hesitated. Thanks to them and, no doubt, also, in my stubbornness and a little luck, I could spend much of my time to this passion, vice and wonderful it is to write, create a parallel life where refuge against adversity, it becomes natural the unusual and extraordinary nature, dispel chaos, beautifying the ugly, and perpetuates the moment of death becomes a passing show.
was not easy to write stories. Turning words, the project withered in the paper and the ideas and images fainted. How to reanimate? Fortunately, there were the teachers to learn from them and follow their example. Flaubert taught me that talent is a tough discipline and a long patience. Faulkner, which is the form-writing and structure, what enhances or impoverish the subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, the number and ambition are as important as skill novel style and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are actions and a novel, play, essay, committed today and the best options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that literature is devoid of moral Malraux inhuman and the epic heroism and fit in as much as present at the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey and the Iliad.
If convene in this speech to all the writers who owe some or much their shadows would plunge us into darkness. Are innumerable. In addition to revealing the secrets of the trade to have made me explore the depths of the human, admire his deeds and horrified with his ravings. Were more helpful friends, the leaders of my vocation, whose books I discovered that even in the worst circumstances, there is hope and that is worth living, if only because without life we \u200b\u200bcould not read or daydream stories.
Sometimes I wondered if in countries like mine, with few readers and many poor, illiterate and injustice, where the culture was the privilege of so few, writing was a luxury not solipsistic. But these doubts never stifled my vocation and always kept writing, even in periods when food work absorbed most of my time. I think I did it right, because if so the literature to flourish in a society was first requirement to achieve high culture, freedom, prosperity and justice, she had never existed. On the contrary, through literature, which formed consciences, desires and aspirations that inspired it, to the disappointment of reality with which we return trip to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is far less cruel than when storytellers humanize life began with his fables. We would be worse than they are without the good books we read, more conformist, less restless and rebellious and critical spirit, the engine of progress, or even exist. Just as writing, reading is to protest against the shortcomings of life. Who seeks in fiction what does not, say, needless to say, even knowing that life as it is not enough to fill our thirst for the absolute foundation of the human condition and should be better. Invent fictions to live in some way the many lives we would like to have when we have just one.
Without the fiction would be less aware of the importance of freedom to make life livable and hell where it becomes when it is trampled by a tyrant, an ideology or religion. Those who doubt that literature, as well as sinking into the dream of beauty and happiness, we warning against all forms of oppression, ask yourself why all the regimes bent on controlling the behavior of citizens from cradle to grave, so afraid that establish systems of censorship to suppress and monitor with such suspicion to freelance writers. Because they know the risk in letting the imagination runs through the books, seditious become fiction when the reader checks the freedom that makes them possible and that they exercised with obscurantism and fear that lurk in the real world. Like it or not, they know it or not, the fabulous, inventing stories, dissatisfaction spread, showing that the world is wrong, that fantasy life is richer than the daily routine. This finding, if it takes root in sensitivity and awareness, the public becomes more difficult to manipulate, to accept the lies of those who wanted them to believe that, behind bars, inquisitors and jailers live safer and better.
Good literature builds bridges between different people and making us enjoy, suffer, or surprise, we are united under the languages, beliefs, customs and prejudices that divide us. When the great white whale, Captain Ahab buried at sea, shrinks the hearts of readers identically in Tokyo, Lima or Timbuktu. When Emma Bovary swallows the arsenic, Anna Karenina throws herself into the train and Julien Sorel goes to the gallows, and when, in the South, the urban doctor Juan Dahlmann out of that grocery store of the pampas to face the knife of a killer, or note that all Comala residents of the village of Pedro Páramo, are dead, the thrill is like the reader who worships Buddha, Confucius, Christ, Allah, or is an agnostic, light jacket and tie, hijab, kimono and pants. Literature creates a brotherhood within the human diversity and eclipses that erect boundaries between men and women of ignorance, ideologies, religions, languages \u200b\u200band stupidity.
Like all ages have had their horrors, ours is the fans, that of suicide bombers, ancient species convinced that paradise is gained by killing, the blood of the innocent wash collective outrage, correct injustices and imposes the truth about false belief. Countless victims are sacrificed each day at various locations around the world who feel possessors of absolute truths. We thought that with the collapse of totalitarian empires, coexistence, peace, pluralism, human rights, would be imposed and the world would back the holocaust, genocide, invasions and wars of extermination. None of that has happened. New forms of barbarism fueled rampant by fanaticism and, with the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction can not be excluded that any small group of crazed redemptive one day cause a nuclear disaster. You have to stand in their way, face them and defeat them. Not many, but the sound of their crimes reverberate around the globe and we are overwhelmed with horror the nightmares they cause. We must not be intimidated by those who would take away the freedom we have been winning in the long feat of civilization. Defend liberal democracy, with all its limitations, continues to mean political pluralism, coexistence, tolerance, human rights, respect for the critics, the law, elections free alternation in power, everything that has gone feral taking of life and getting closer, though never reached, the beautiful and perfect life pretending literature, one that just making it up, writing it and reading it we deserve. Facing the homicidal fanatics defend our right to dream and make our dreams come true. In my youth, like many writers of my generation, was a Marxist and believed that socialism would be the remedy to the exploitation and social injustices that raged in my country, Latin America and the rest of the Third World. My disappointment of statism and collectivism, and my transition to the Democratic and liberal than I am, I try to be-was long, difficult, and took out episodes slowly and following the conversion of the Cuban Revolution, which had me excited at first, the authoritarian model and vertical Soviet Union, testimony of dissidents who managed to slip through the barbed wire of the Gulag, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact countries, thanks to thinkers like Raymond Aron, Jean-François Revel, Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper, whom I owe my appreciation of the culture of democracy and open societies. These teachers were an example of lucidity and grace when the intelligentsia of the West seemed, frivolity or opportunism, have succumbed to the spell of Soviet socialism, or worse yet, the coven's bloody Cultural Revolution China.
a child dreamed of someday to Paris because, dazzled with French literature, thought to live there and breathe the air they breathed Balzac, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Proust, help me become a real writer which, if not out of Peru would only be a pseudo-writer on Sundays and holidays. And the truth is I owe to France, French culture, memorable lessons, as that literature is both a vocation as a discipline, work and stubbornness. I lived there when Sartre and Camus were alive and writing, in the years of Ionesco, Beckett, Bataille and Cioran, the discovery of the theater of Brecht and the films of Ingmar Bergman, the NPT of Jean Vilar and Jean Louis Barrault Odéon of the Nouvelle Vague and Le Nouveau Roman and speeches, beautiful pieces of literature, Andre Malraux, and perhaps the most theatrical show Europe at that time, press conferences and Olympic thunder General de Gaulle. But perhaps what most grateful to France is the discovery of Latin America. I learned that Peru was part of a vast community that sister history, geography, the social and political problems, some way of being and the delicious language speaking and writing. And in those same years produced a new and burgeoning literature. There I read Borges, Octavio Paz, Cortázar, García Márquez, Fuentes, Cabrera Infante, Rulfo, Onetti, Carpentier, Edwards, Donovan and many others, whose writings were revolutionizing the English-language fiction and thanks to whom Europe and much the world discovered that Latin America was not only the continent of coups, the leaders of operetta, the bearded guerrillas and shakers of the mambo and the cha cha, but also ideas, fantasies and literary art forms that went beyond the picturesque and spoke a universal language. From then to this day, not without tripping and slipping, Latin America has been progressing, though, as stated in the verse of César Vallejo,
still
There, brothers, much to do. Dictatorships have less than before, only Cuba and its candidate to go along, Venezuela, and some clowns populist and pseudo-democracies such as Bolivia and Nicaragua. But in the rest of the continent, evil evil, democracy is working, supported by broad popular consensus, and for the first time in our history, we have a left and right, as in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Mexico and most Central American respect the law, freedom of criticism, elections and the renewal in power. That is the good way and if you persevere in it, fighting the insidious corruption and is integrating the world, Latin America will finally be the continent of the future and will be present.
I've never felt a foreigner in Europe or indeed anywhere. In all the places I lived in Paris, London, Barcelona, \u200b\u200bMadrid, Berlin, Washington, New York, Brazil and the Dominican Republic, I felt my house. I've always found a lair where he could live in peace and working, learn things, to encourage illusions, find friends, good books and topics for writing. I do not think I have become, without intending to, a citizen of the world, has undermined what they call "roots", my links to my own country, so neither would have much importance, because if so, the Peruvian experience would not feed me as a writer and asomarían not always in my stories, even when these appear to occur far from Peru. I have to live so long outside the country where I was born rather strengthened those bonds, adding a perspective more lucid, and nostalgia, which can differentiate the adjective and the substance and keeps reverberating memories. Love of country in which you were born can not be obligatory, but, like any other love, a spontaneous movement of the heart, as the uniting of lovers, parents and children, friends together.
Al Peru I take him in the belly because he was born, grew up, I trained and lived those experiences of childhood and youth that shaped my personality, forged my vocation, and because that I loved, hated, rejoiced I suffered and dreamed. What happens in it affects me, moves and irritates me more than what happens elsewhere. I have not sought and will not have set me, it just is. Some fellow accused me of being a traitor and I was about to lose citizenship when, during the last dictatorship, asked the world's democratic governments to penalize the regime with diplomatic and economic sanctions, as I have always done with all dictatorships, any nature, that of Pinochet, Fidel Castro, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the imams of Iran, apartheid South Africa, the uniformed satraps of Burma (now Myanmar). And do it again tomorrow if-the fate forbid and permit-Peruvians Peru was the victim once more of a coup to annihilate our fragile democracy. That was no precipitate action and passion of resentment, as they wrote some polygraphs used to judge others from their own smallness. It was an act consistent with my belief that a dictatorship is an absolute evil for a country, a source of brutality and corruption and deep wounds that are slow to close, poison their future and create unhealthy habits and practices that extend along generations delaying the democratic reconstruction. That is why dictatorships must be combated mercilessly by all the means at our disposal, including economic sanctions. It is regrettable that democratic governments, instead of setting an example, in solidarity with those who, as the Ladies in White in Cuba, the Venezuelan-resistant, or Aung San Suu Kyi and Liu Xiaobo, boldly confronting the dictatorships who suffer to be displayed often complacent not to them but with his executioners. Those brave, fighting for their freedom, also fighting for ours.
A compatriot of mine, José María Arguedas, Peru called the country of "all the blood." Do not think there formula to define it better. That we are and that all Peruvians have inside us Like it or not: a sum of traditions, races, creeds and cultures from the four cardinal points. I feel proud heir of the Hispanic cultures that made fabrics and feather cloaks Nazca and Paracas and Mochica and Inca ceramics on display in the best museums in the world, the builders of Machu Picchu, the Great Chimu, Chan Chan, Kuelap, Sipan, the Witch and huacas of the Sun and the Moon, and English, with his saddlebags, swords and horses, brought to Peru to Greece, Rome, the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Renaissance, Cervantes, Quevedo and Gongora, and language of Castilla brunt of the Andes softened. And that also came with Spain Africa with its vigor, its music and vibrant imagination to enrich the diversity of Peru. If we dig a little we found that Peru, like Borges's Aleph, is in small format worldwide. What an extraordinary privilege for a country that has no identity because it has them all!
The conquest of America was cruel and violent as all the gains, of course, and we criticize it, but without forgetting to do, that those who committed those crimes were offal and in large numbers, our great-grandparents and grandparents, the English who came to America and there acriollado, not those who stayed on their land. Those criticisms, to be fair, should be a self-criticism. Because, after gaining independence from Spain, two hundred years ago, who took power in the former colonies, instead of redeeming the Indian and do justice to the ancient wrongs, so continued exploiting greed and ferocity as the conquerors, and in some countries, decimating and exterminated. Let's be
clearly: two centuries of indigenous empowerment is a responsibility exclusively ours and we failed. She is still a pending issue in Latin America. There is one exception to this disgrace and shame.
much as I want Spain to Peru and my debt to it is as big as the gratitude that I have. If it were not for Spain would never have come to this rostrum, nor to be a famous writer, and perhaps, like so many unfortunate colleagues, would walk into the limbo of the writers with no luck, not editors, or prizes, or readers, whose talent sad consolation, perhaps, one day discover posterity. In Spain, all my books published, awards received exaggerated, as Carlos Barral and friends Carmen Balcells and many others crave it because my stories have readers. And Spain gave me a second nationality when could lose mine. I have never felt the slightest inconsistency between a Peruvian and have a English passport because I have always felt that Spain and Peru are the obverse and reverse of the same thing, not just in my little person, also in critical situations such as history, language and culture.
Of all the years I've lived on English soil, remember I spent five glow in the beloved Barcelona in the early seventies. The Franco dictatorship was still standing and still shot, but it was already a fossil in rags, and especially in the field of culture, unable to maintain the controls of yesteryear. Opened cracks and crevices that censorship was not enough to patch and English society they absorbed new ideas, books, schools of thought and values \u200b\u200band artistic forms hitherto prohibited by subversives. No city took both Barcelona and better than the beginning of opening or experienced a similar excitement in all fields of ideas and creation. It became the cultural capital of Spain, where he had to be breathing the advance of freedom is coming. And in a way, was also the cultural capital of Latin America by the number of painters, writers, editors and artists from Latin American countries that settled there, or came and went to Barcelona, \u200b\u200bbecause it was where you had to be if you wanted to be a poet, novelist, painter or composer of our time. For me, those were the years of unforgettable companionship, friendship, conspiracies and fruitful intellectual work. As before Paris, Barcelona was a Tower of Babel, a universal cosmopolitan city, which was exciting to live and work, and where, for the first time since the days of civil war, English and Latin American writers were mixed and fraternized, recognizing owners the same tradition and allies in a common and a certainty that the end of the dictatorship was imminent and that in Spain democratic culture would be the main protagonist. 8
Although it was not so precisely, the English transition from dictatorship to democracy has been one of the best stories of modern times, an example of how, when common sense and rationality prevail and opponents parked political sectarianism in favor of the common good, such prodigious events can occur as of the novels of magical realism. The English transition from authoritarianism to freedom, from underdevelopment to prosperity, a society of contrasts and inequalities Third World country to a middle class, its integration into Europe and its adoption in a few years of a democratic culture, admired the world and triggered the modernization of Spain. It was for me an exciting and enlightening live up close and sometimes from within. Hopefully nationalism, incurable plague the modern world and also from Spain, do not spoil this happy story.
hate all forms of nationalism, ideology, or, rather, religion, parochial, short flight, exclusive, that trims the intellectual horizon and hides in its bosom ethnic and racial prejudices, it becomes the supreme value in moral and ontological privilege, the fortuitous circumstance of the place birth. Along with religion, nationalism has been the cause of the worst slaughters of history, as the two world wars and the current bloodletting in the Middle East. Nothing has contributed as much as nationalism in Latin America is balkanized, torn apart in senseless strife and litigation and wasted astronomical resources to buy weapons instead of building schools, libraries and hospitals.
not confuse nationalism ear and its rejection of "other" provided seed of violence, patriotism, feeling healthy and generous love for the land where one was born, where they lived their ancestors and the first dreams were forged, landscape geographies family, loved ones and occurrences that become milestones in the memory and shield against loneliness. The homeland are not flags and anthems, or apodictic discourse on the iconic heroes, but a handful of places and people that live in our memories and tinged with melancholy, the warm feeling that, no matter where we are, there is a home to which we return.
Peru is for me a Arequipa where I was born but never lived, a city that my mother, my grandparents and my uncles taught me to know through his memories and regrets, because my whole family tribe, Arequipa and often do, was always at the White City with her in his wandering existence. Piura is the desert, carob and suffering burrito, which Piurans of my youth called "foot outside," cute and sad nickname, "where I discovered that the storks were not bringing babies into the world but the pairs produced by a brutality that was a mortal sin. San Miguel is the College and the Variety Theatre where I first saw up on stage a short work written by me. Is the corner of Columbus and Diego Ferré in Miraflores Lima-we called the Barrio Alegre, where I changed the long shorts, I smoked my first cigarette, I learned to dance, to love and pleading for the girls. It's dusty and shaky editorial staff of The Chronicle where, in my sixteen years, my first veiled weapons journalist, a profession that, with the literature, has occupied most of my life and made me like books, live, learn better world and hang out with people from everywhere and of all records, great people, good, bad and atrocious. It is the Leoncio Prado Military Academy, where I learned that Peru was the small pocket of middle class where I had lived until then confined and protected, but a big country, old, bitter, unbalanced and shaken by all sorts of social storms . Clandestine cells are of Cahuide in which a handful of San Marcos with preparing the world revolution. And Peru is my friends with the Freedom Movement, for three years, including bombings, blackouts and terrorist killings, work in defense of democracy and culture of freedom.
Peru is Patricia's cousin turned up little nose and indomitable character with which I was fortunate to marry 45 years ago and still supports the foibles, neuroses and tantrums to help me write. Without it my life had long ago dissolved into a chaotic whirlwind and not born Alvaro, Gonzalo, Morgan and six grandchildren that we extend and happy life. She does everything and does it well. Solve problems, manage the economy, brings order to chaos, keeping out journalists and outsiders, defending my time, decides the appointments and travel, and unpack it, and is so generous that even when you create scolds me, I make the best of praise: "Mario, the only thing you serve is to write."
Back to the literature. The paradise of childhood is for me a literary myth but a reality that I lived and enjoyed in the large family house of three courtyards, in Cochabamba, where with my cousins \u200b\u200band schoolmates could play stories Tarzan and Salgari, and in the Prefecture of Piura, in whose attics nesting bats, silent shadows which filled with mystery the starry nights that hot country. In those years, writing was playing a game that I held the family, a grace that I deserved applause, to me, grandchild, nephew, the son without father because my father had died and gone to heaven. It was a tall and handsome, uniformed sailor, whose photo adorned my bedside and prayed and kissed me before bed. One morning in Piura, which still does not think I have recovered, my mother told me that this gentleman, indeed, was alive. And that same day we would go to live with him to Lima. I was eleven and since then, everything changed. I discovered I lost my innocence and loneliness, authority, adult life and fear. My salvation was read, read good books, take refuge in those worlds where life was exciting, intense, one adventure after another, where they could feel free and be happy again. And it was written, in secret, like who comes to a vice inconfensable, a forbidden passion. The literature was no longer a game. It became a way to withstand adversity, to protest, to rebel, to escape the intolerable, my reason for living. From then until now, in all the circumstances in which I have been shot or beaten, on the edge of despair give myself body and soul to my work has been the light storyteller pointing out the tunnel, the salvation that leads to the wreck to the beach.
Although it costs me a lot of work and makes me sweat blood, and as a writer, I sometimes feel the threat of paralysis, the drought of the imagination, nothing has made me enjoy the life both how to spend the months and years to build a history, from its uncertain dawn, the image stored in a memory experience, which became a restlessness, an enthusiasm, a daydream that germinated later in a project and the decision busy trying to turn that fog ghost in a story. "Writing is a way to live," said Flaubert. Yes, very true, a way of life with enthusiasm and joy and a crackling fire in the head, struggling with wayward words to master it, exploring the wide world as a hunter in pursuit of coveted prey to feed the fledgling fiction and placate the voracious appetite to grow throughout history that would swallow all the stories. Come to feel the vertigo that leads a novel in gestation, when it takes shape and appears to start living on their own, with characters that move, act, think, feel and command respect and consideration, which is no longer possible arbitrarily impose a behavior or deprived of their free will without killing them, without losing history persuasive power, is an experience that is spellbinding as the first time, so full and giddy like making love with the woman he loved days, weeks and months, endlessly .
Speaking of fiction, I talked a lot about the novel and some of the theater, another of his supernal forms. A great injustice, of course. The theater was my first love, since, adolescent, I saw at the Teatro Segura in Lima,
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller, a show which left me overflowing with excitement and rushed me to write a drama Incas. If the Lima of the fifties had been a theatrical movement would have been a playwright rather than a novelist. I had not and that should be increasingly directed towards the narrative. But my love of theater never ceased, dozed nestled in the shadow of the novels, as a temptation and a nostalgia, especially when I saw a captivating piece. In the late seventies, the persistent memory of a centuries-old aunt, Mom, that in the last years of his life, cut with the surrounding reality and take refuge in the memories and fiction, I suggested a story. And I felt so ominous, that this was a story for the theater, only on stage charged for the animation and splendor of successful fiction. I wrote the trembling excited both beginner and I enjoyed watching her on stage, with Norma Aleandro in the role of the heroine, who, since then, including novels and novels, essays and essay, I have relapsed several times. Of course, I never imagined that in my seventies, I would go up (maybe I should say drag) on \u200b\u200bstage to act. Reckless adventure that made me live for the first time in flesh and blood the miracle that is, for someone who has spent his life writing fiction, embodying a few hours to a character in the fantasy fiction live before an audience. I can not thank enough my dear friends, the director and actress Joan Ollé Aitana Sanchez Gijon, encouraged me to share with them the fantastic experience (despite the panic that accompanied it).
Literature is a false representation of life, however, helps us to understand better, to guide us through the maze in which we were born, evolves, and we die. She retaliated us the setbacks and frustrations that real life deals us and thanks to decipher it, at least partially, the hieroglyph which is usually the existence for the vast majority of human beings, especially those that encourage more questions than answers, and confess our confusion to issues such as transcendence, the individual and collective destiny, the soul, the meaning or meaninglessness of history, the here and beyond rational knowledge.
has always fascinated me to imagine that uncertain circumstances in which our ancestors, yet slightly different animal, baby language that allowed them to communicate, began in the caves, around campfires, in boiling nights of threats, lightning, thunder, growling of wild beasts, "to make up stories and tell them. That was the turning point of our destination, because in these rounds of primitives by the voice suspense and fantasy counter, civilization began, the long passage which gradually humanize us and lead us to invent the sovereign individual and detached from the tribe, science, arts, law, liberty, scrutinizing the entrails of nature the human body, space and travel to the stars. Those tales, fables, myths, legends, which first sounded like music to new audiences intimidated by the mysteries and dangers of a world where everything was unfamiliar and dangerous, should have a refreshing swim, a haven for those always on the minds who lives, for which there is meant to just eat, shelter from the elements, kill and fornicate. From they began to dream of community, sharing dreams, encouraged by the storytellers, were no longer tied to the wheel of survival, a whirlwind of chores brutalizing, and turned his life dream, joy, fantasy and a revolutionary design : break this containment and change and improve, a fight to quell those desires and ambitions that they incited the lives figurative, and curiosity about the unknown clear that I was starry surroundings.
That process is never interrupted when he was born rich writing and stories, as well as heard, could read and they reached the residence gives the literature. Therefore, it must be repeated endlessly to convince it to future generations: the fiction is more than entertainment, rather than an intellectual exercise that sharpens the sensitivity and the critical spirit awakened. It is a necessity for civilization still exists, renewing and preserving the best of us human. Not to go back to the barbarism of the isolation and life is not reduced to the pragmatism of the specialists who see things in depth but ignore their surroundings, precedes and continues. For let us not serve us to invent machines to be their servants and slaves. And because a world without literature would be a world without desires or ideals and contempt, a world of automatons without what makes the human being truly human: the ability to leave and move himself into another, in others, modeled with the clay of our dreams.
From the cave to the skyscraper, the stick to weapons of mass destruction, tautological life of the tribe to the era of globalization, the fictions of literature have been many human experiences, preventing men and women succumb to lethargy, withdrawal, resignation. Nothing has sown so much concern, removed both the imagination and desires, and that life of lies that add to which we have through the literature to star the great adventures, great passions, that real life will never give us. The literature lies become truths through us, readers processed contaminated desires and, because of the fiction, constantly challenged with the mediocre reality. Sorcery, to delude ourselves with having what we have, being what we are not, access that can not exist where, as pagan gods, we are earthly and eternal at the same time, literature enters our minds the nonconformity and rebellion behind all the feats that have helped reduce violence in human relations. A decrease violence, not end it. Because we will always, fortunately, an unfinished story. So we have to keep dreaming, reading and writing, the most effective way we found to alleviate our perishability, defeating the rottenness of time and make the impossible possible.
Stockholm, December 8, 2010.
