BLESSED LITERATURE!
Absolutist governments and leaders have always known that reading enriches and helps to understand the position of the other who, through their censors and the systematic burning of books, have believed they could eliminate the other, their trace and even their shadow. Knowing even that, in relation to the enemy, knowing him implies humanizing him, understanding him, and only for that, seeing him less bad.
Being able to move to other times and other places, dress with another conscience or suffer other conflicts, teaches us to know other peoples and other ethnic groups. And we not only learn from others, but also to get to know ourselves better, our remote past and our most immediate origins.
Thoughtful reading broadens a person’s intellectual range, their opinions, and their capacity for criticism. Reading encourages critical examination of what is exposed and offered to us, with the added advantage that this condition makes us less manipulable. The more widely read a people is, the more difficult it is to indoctrinate them.
It is true that this is a cumulative criterion. No particular book can give us absolute knowledge; none will reveal the whole truth to us in a magical way. However, each one will contribute a piece and leave us their sediment, which will shape our own vision. With this process underway, one always reaches the same conclusions “nothing is absolutely black or white” and “nobody is, not always, not completely right”.
Another side effect of reading is that it will improve the way of expression, something essential today. Reading teaches communication and never in the history of mankind have we been more dependent on communication. There is no doubt that not only does the precision and richness of nuances in the vocabulary increase, but they also learn to state and order ideas with greater clarity.
Regardless of what we do, we can be competent professionals of what is ours, but if we are not capable of expressing ourselves clearly and exposing our ideas, that brightness that is supposed to us is questioned and impoverished.
It’s not enough to watch the movie. The cinema and recently the world of big series productions can lead us to believe that they are a substitute for literature. Sometimes I have been asked what literature can offer when a movie or the chapter of a television series tell the same conflict in less time. and with less effort. Cinema, television and their adaptations have their undeniable virtues, including a limited time and an intellectual effort, generally less demanding.
From my point of view, there is no direct confrontation between the two media, only a dispute over time, the place that one occupies and the other does not, and vice versa. While I go to the cinema, I don’t read, although the unagiWhat is it multitaskingcan watch a series while reading.
Literature has its own elements that make it unique and irreplaceable. For example, the digressive ability of thomas mannjust read with some concentration Death in VeniceWe do not find that intention in the film, even though it is an excellent job of Lucino Visconti. It is worth noting that I am in love with Silvana Mangano and that his mere presence would be enough to captivate me on the tape, but not even with that priority could it be replaced by the book.
What to say or how to point out something more about the depth of a character from Dostoevsky or the rhetorical dazzling of a Juan Benet; These are just some of the elements provided exclusively by the literary experience. Reading a paper book is an intimate and spiritual practice, and nothing is equal to that silence and that state of absolute concentration in which a good book plunges us, the exterior disappears and the interior and its majestic landscapes open up to us. unsuspected world. Let’s read. Nice Wednesday!
