Manuel (manuel-jf@zotum.net) wrote

An old friend I haven't seen for a long time has brought me a book by Cristina Morales with the suggestive title "Ni amo ni dios, ni marido, ni partido de futbol" (Neither master nor god, nor husband, nor football match).

Of course I forbade him to give me any spoilers: I am averse to spoilers. I like to peel back the first layer of the onion with just the hint of the title. I like to imagine what I will find, plots, adventures, enigmas, vicissitudes of the characters... Sometimes I create on my own real parallel books even before reading the actual book.

If the unopened book is better than the one I imagined, I feel a great joy, and if not, what can I do, a huge disappointment. Basically, it is the same as when we meet someone when they are introduced to us: our knowledge of others is in fact deeply speculative, a mixture of hypotheses, imagination and daydreams.

It is a process which, moreover, never ends, like that of reading. As in reading, this knowledge enriches us more and more or, on the contrary, impoverishes us. Lost friendships, broken loves, corrupted societies are but the frustrated end result of this anxious, never-ending attempt, mixed with the fear of reaching the end, that of paper or that of life...

"Sometimes I create on my own real parallel books even before reading the actual book... If the unopened book is better than the one I imagined, I feel a great joy, and if not, what can I do, a huge disappointment. "

I wrote a longish response that I later deleted as perhaps inappropriate or annoying, but it may still be worthwhile to keep it:

If I understand you correctly (and I'm not positive that I do), there seems to be a kind of correlation to piece by Maria Popova that I posted this morning. The stories we constantly make up about the world and tell ourselves, can hinder our appreciation for what is actual or inhibit the acquisition of new knowledge. Krishnamurti has a book called "Freedom from the Known" in which, as I remember, he posits that all though we believe the unknown to something terrifying, we are actually frightened only by what we already know, think that we know, or imagine.  

When I was in high school, English literature was a very important subject for me. And when I started my 10th or 11th grade class with a new teacher, I instantly decided I could not abide him and went to the school's counselor to see if I could get transferred to another class. She advised me to wait a little and see whether my first impressions were correct.  Needless to say, they were quite wrong, and he turned out to be one of the best teachers I ever had.

So Maria, and the people she cites, speak about the wisdom in assuming an attitude of uncertainty when confronting new experience. Not an easy thing, as we grow older and have so much experience already behind us.  But lately I am finding a certain value in my basic feeling of insecurity towards myself.  Most of my friends seem to interact with the world from a reservoir of security, especially when meeting younger or less experienced people.  Whereas I tend to relate to people as if the most immature and inexperienced person is probably wiser than me, a born and lifelong fool.