){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
){kind=logo}
){kind=icon}
Testimony of an Autodidact
If I learned anything from books as a child, it was not to read. Closing them was the best time; opening them was the worst. For many years, it remained that way. Choosing a title, going through the first few pages, falling asleep: such was the inevitable routine. Oh, and then waking up feeling guilty! Today, I don’t fall asleep when I read, but overcoming this took a lot of work.
In general, enthusiastic book lovers do not regard reading as an obligation; instead, they share the mystique that sees a book as a meeting place for all that is human, including what is human in those who never read.
To say that someone is a “donkey” because they don’t read is like saying that they are a donkey because they have never been to the sea, eaten maguey worms, or slept in the rain. Everyone has the reading of the reality that has touched them; everyone has placed their hands on the braille of the world in their own way.
My sisters, brothers, and parents read a lot. I was the laziest. Before I was fifteen, I had only read Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which was important because it was the first book I bought myself, and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the pages still resonate with me. But at that age – fifteen, I say – my apathy took a turn. An outbreak of hepatitis deprived me for a few months of what I loved most (my theatre acting classes in a workshop for teenagers), and I compensated for this loss with the only thing that could substitute for them in my bed: theater books.
I devoured all the books in the family library. There were many of them because, apparently, my parents had shared the uncommon pleasure of reading theatre in their married years. (Maybe they did it together, taking turns playing the characters: I can imagine them, my mother playing Lady Macbeth, and my father responding with the speeches of her also evil husband).
I consumed the more than two hundred plays in my house, rotating them with the ones I had begun to buy myself. It was a genuine feast to find the complete works of the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello (whom I loved more than anyone else at the time) in three volumes at the meager price of 189 pesos, more or less expressed in terms of today’s value.
I was so eager to read that some days, I devoured up to three entire plays, including those in three acts! During high school vacations, I read in the living room, and at parties, I would slip out to a quiet room or stairway to finish my book. In a couple of years, I went through the entire history of theater, from Aeschylus (the Greek tragedian) to the most recent Mexican theater of the twentieth century, coming to feel capable of ordering the tremendous human drama alphabetically.
That great enthusiasm ended with the end of my first love. Heartbroken, reading waned: being an intellectual was no longer useful. However, now I can say that I had a passion for reading, the obsessive joy of going through the pages of a book like needle and thread.
I don’t like to revere books, at least no more than other things. I don’t like to value them as if they were higher entities or beings of a different kind. I don’t like, in fact, beings of a different kind. Books, like music and works of art, are a kind of entity in transition between a thing and a person. Even people – I prefer not to pay them any homage. I hate to go and ask someone for something, especially if it’s a book, and be an amusement to them. Jorge Luis Borges, a reader like few others, suggested, “If a book bores you, leave it.” That’s right: if you don’t feel like reading, don’t read. I confess that my autodidacticism dictates the same thing to me about almost everything: if you don’t feel like eating, don’t eat, and at the end of the day, limit your life as much as you want, just like that man who said: “Sometimes I sit and think. And sometimes I just sit.”
Some of those times when I’m just sitting make me want to read, so I do. Then, from that peace in reading, which is even more calming than simply sitting, everything around me becomes transfigured into what the pages tell me.
Many people associate autodidacticism with books. You tell them, “I’m self-taught,” and they tell you, “I love to read too,” or “I have three degrees, but what I like the most is that I learned by reading.” Of course, you can read with a self-taught attitude, but they are not the same: autodidacticism has more to do with learning what you love. For example, it is wonderfully self-taught to suddenly realize that what attracts you most about reading printed books is the noise that the pages make when you turn them or that you don’t like e-books because they don’t have a smell (as my friend María Teresa de Mucha pointed out to me); or that you do enjoy them but not to read novels, much less suspense, because you can’t feel the thickness of the pages to know if the unexpected ending is approaching.
I like books when I realize that behind them, there is someone saying something, and the truth is that I have chosen to be self-taught because what I like most in life is to talk (with people, with things). It must be understood that a text is not just the transcription of someone’s flow of thought or subconscious or emotions; in writing, there is also their body. Indeed, all the experiences collected up to the moment of writing are there. That is why, when reading, one can have the distinct feeling of being with someone.
Acquiring books is not like accumulating goods but making friends (sorry for the cliché, but that’s how it is). A library is like a neighborhood. There is nothing more bustling than a cluttered library (like friends, who are anything but orderly. That’s why the master Inchi Andrupanda Yanoandapata denied that circles of friends existed; friendship never has an order, he said). A well-ordered library is like a school where a parsimonious teacher pulls out the books and makes the students speak one at a time. On the other hand, among friends (or in a classroom that seems full of friends), we should all talk at the same time.
Books are never closed! Perhaps that is what the beautiful protagonist of The Lady of the Lake stories noticed. In her madness, she filled the floor around her bed with books as if she could ward off some specter with them; books were always alert guardians.
Missing a friend is like having a lost book in a vast library. Our brothers, on the other hand, are unique copies of books not in any other library but ours.
Borges speaks of a book without beginning or end, a book whose pages are infinite and disappear in the hands like sand: once you lose the page you were reading, you cannot find it again, no matter how much you look for it. Many things can be inferred from this, for example, that there is no point in underlining any fragment you like: you will never find it again.
To me, God is the Book of Sand that never opens on the same page. Of course, you can write down what it says, but you’ll just be wasting precious time because you could read another page just as important! In fact, the phrases of that book often sneak through our memory and even become confused, like grains in our hands or, better yet, like drops of water in the sea.
Pondering the above, I suddenly have the clear impression that reading is the form of meditation that characterizes this part of the world that engulfs us, which we call the West. The East chooses other forms, ones without words or, rather, without discourse. However, several things in both worlds are similar: to begin with, what we tend to believe happens inside those who read or meditate (having a somewhat naïve imagination): The meditator, in his upright and still position, is usually seen as someone who has become empty and not someone in deep internal turmoil (which is what, in reality, is almost always happening). Neither can we perceive the whirlwind that drags the reader inside.
The particularity of this type of Western meditation is that it is a form of communication (again, reading is making friends). In the West, to meditate is to reach ourselves through another and another through us. Meanwhile, in the East—as far as I have read and been told—to meditate is to dissolve one’s identity into the ineffable. In the West, we are more of a cuddle, of being together.
Anyone who interrupts reading is interfering in an impassioned conversation. When it tries to promote reading, the West is encouraging that conversation. I don’t know why the idea created in most people is that reading is an obligation, that it is essential to read if only for the sake of it, a kind of superstition in which subjecting the eyes to the impact of the letters is enough to make it meaningful. At least since I was a child, a utilitarian distortion has prevailed in the world, a confusion about the profound experience of reading and human contact as if reading becomes a mechanical act, a routine action that can easily be replaced by any other (isn’t it true that we all interrupt someone who reads for any banality?).
The obligation to read seems to me a bit like what happens with that Borgian Book of Sand, which I call God, which we could consult whenever we wanted, but instead, it terrifies us, and we lock it in a dark closet. This allusion to religion when discussing books does not seem out of place. By re-linking (reuniting), a true religion should dissolve borders and open spaces, broaden our horizons, and not narrow or enclose us. However, the rigor imposed on reading by schools and authoritarian education can substitute for ecclesial terror, transforming libraries into dark theocratic dictatorships. The consequence? One would like to burn the books and celebrate the triumph of paganism with music and anything other than reading: enjoying the street, the novelty, the air, the bustle of true friends…
Final question: How do you make a book a true friend, one you can lose in the middle of a party with the certainty that you will find him again (unless another reader liked him and they went home together)? And other questions, unavoidable, given this last sensual image: why are we so jealous of our books? Why is it so much trouble to borrow them and, once in our hands, return them to their former lovers?
Translation by Daniel Wetta
){kind=icon}
){kind=icon}
This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
)