By Claudio Araya, Academic School of Psychology, Adolfo Ibáñez University
Sometimes, to value something it is necessary to imagine what it would be like to live without having that something, only then can we understand more clearly the importance of what we may be taking for granted.
We can ask ourselves: What would it be like to live in a world where books did not exist?
Of course, not only would we lose a valuable object, but more profoundly, our lives would be impoverished to such a degree that we would put our very humanity at risk.
If we look closely, books are not just material artifacts, where we find a set of pages linked together, or in our technological days, a mere digitized file that we transfer from one folder to another. Books (even bad ones) are worlds of meaning and significance, unfolding before our eyes the moment we read them.
Even when books were originally used as a source of records, since in them commercial accounts were recorded or laws and mandates were remembered, they gradually became channels of expression, thus appearing the mythical story and the heroic narratives. The books then became a place where the sense of who we are and who we wanted to be began to be forged.
A written text is not only a record of someone in particular, it is a reflection of collective thinking and feeling, which transcends the individual, thanks to the letters we have an understanding that goes beyond ourselves. By reading we come into contact with worlds that would otherwise be invisible to us and that would pass into oblivion.
Reading makes us transcend our own experiences, they expand and enrich them, thus, for example, thanks to the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles we can get closer to understanding how the ancient Greeks inhabited the world, and thanks to Borges’s texts we walk paths that fork of impossible worlds, and these are just two illustrious examples.
In a deep sense, books are a means of expression of inalienable human freedom, perhaps for this reason dictators light bonfires to burn the pages that seem dangerous to them, thereby banally seeking to extinguish expressions of freedom. But as we well know, a burned leaf is never an extinct idea.
The letters do not describe the world, rather they expand our horizon of possibility. Poetry, fiction and essay produce something that did not exist before. We not only create worlds of fantasies, we constitute emotional spaces that did not exist before the word was pronounced. From the ancient psalms to the contemporary verses of Alejandra Pizarnik, the lyrics have the power to shake and shudder us, to make us feel the nuances of love and heartbreak. Reading is the way to investigate the immeasurable human experience, which the more we explore, the more unapproachable it becomes.
Letters are a way of getting in touch with each other, both with those who lived before us and with our contemporaries. Each book updates a new conversation at the present moment.
Let us now return to our original question: what would it be like to live without books? As we can see, it would not only imply losing a specific object, or having empty shelves. It would mean giving up life and the wealth that is in them, it would mean losing spaces of intimacy and freedom, it would mean resigning ourselves to living in the desert of the soul.
We just celebrated book day, and we can appreciate the depth of his legacy.
I don’t want to live in a world where books don’t exist or are relegated to a select few, on their imprisoned shelves. I want to live in a world where books continue to be synonymous with expression, freedom and encounter.
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