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Professor Alejandro Gálvez Cancino, a political scientist (who owns a library of about 10,000 volumes), complains that his university-level students don’t want to read books. If one leaves them a reading assignment, it must be restricted to some stand-alone chapter or an academic article. He explains that this only provides young people with a condensed vision of the study topics but not the development of thought that follows the whole argument of a book. I think he is right: some ideas can be known through dissemination essays, others are typical of an academic text, and some can only be accessed through several chapters and linking a lot of information.
But I also think that books have earned their discrediting. The cult of the book has turned it into something sacred, a divine but untouchable (and somehow shocking and even terrifying) object. What the young people of other times did not dare to do, it seems that those of today are determined to achieve: get rid of that torment. Those of us who were born in the second half of the twentieth century, although we honored books, did not read anything; The new generations read as done long ago, but they do not read books.
If books are essential, but no one reads them, or they are read less and less, will we have to give up their existence? I think not; young people can return to them if we start to unteach them what we have all learned wrongly about what a book is.
The young writer Carla Durán, also a teacher, tells me that her students are scandalized that she uses a book to prevent a door from slamming. She advises them, “Don’t worry, it’s just a book.” And the truth is that the students cross themselves before the sacred volumes, but they do not read them. I think Carla’s detachment is much more palatable than the veneration that makes us fear and tremble.
We all know (having experienced it) that the school has participated fundamentally in the sacralization of books, fostering an idolatry of written expression that distances us from it. (It is not strange that, by way of irreverence, almost blasphemy, young people today write their messages electronically exercising a new language, or at least a new spelling, thus managing to appropriate what belongs to them).
It may be that the best way to help our students rid their fear of books is to show them that their content is still alive; it may also be that the best way to demonstrate this to them is to help them recognize the life they can express through writing.
No knowledge is alien to those who receive and transmit it. No knowledge, not even the most objective and scientific, places itself above human beings or turns anyone into a mere receiver. We are not the transport in which the discoveries of great geniuses or the ideas of anyone travel. All knowledge and every intention to transmit it, including writing, always contain something personal. Students must admit that, in writing, they can never imitate normative models to the extent of making their personalities disappear. On the contrary, it is necessary to show them that they will be able to understand and assimilate the rules better when they use them to express themselves more clearly and involve themselves in the text, filling it with themselves.
In the school I want, if a student believes that writing well is following pre-existing models of perfection, it helps him to understand that there are no perfect models but that every model, if truly a model, is alive, that is, it is organic and therefore changing and imperfect. The students are then shown that the relationship between them and the model is always a relationship between peers and that such a relationship’s condition is that no one subjugates their identity to another. Finally, they are shown that in a text, no matter how variegated and complex it may be, we can always find an other and understand them, as happens in any conversation in which the participants make a real effort to communicate.
The authors of books worth reading always make a real effort to communicate through their text. However, it is crucial to accept that all of them, even “consecrated” authors, always suffer infinite difficulties of expression. Books are never written in a state of purity; they belong to daily life and are full of people’s daily lives with all their difficulties in tow. Some write at odd hours, on their knees, even in the truck, in a hurry (the editor asks for it now!), and never in states of absolute concentration. Carla Durán reminds me that Virginia Woolf regretted that her contemporaries did not enjoy the luxury of locking themselves in their studios to write but had to do so while taking care of the house, the children, the husband (it seems to me that our Rosario Castellanos describes the same). However, the men of the time were still subject to pressures, even if they were their own neuroses, always present to attack “the purity” of their writing. On the day when the news that the First World War had erupted spread throughout the world, the wife of the great German writer Thomas Mann refrained from announcing it to him, fearing his reaction if she interrupted him while he was writing.
Much of what the writer thinks is just a feeling before pouring it into words. (I’m sure most people are governed by what someone once said: “I write to know what I’ve been thinking.”) With writing, the text takes shape; it is born little by little, but the truth is that the writer must travel many deserted stretches before finding paragraphs where there is some life. Then, after correction, they hesitate between removing what is left over from their luminous truth or keeping it as a way to reach it (a path that is often grim). The result is usually a kind of gloom.
That is why the readers must not walk blindly, waiting obediently for the text to guide them at every moment. On the contrary, they must remain lucid and identify the author’s style, knowing they proceed tentatively in approaching their meaning. The authors must be accompanied until they find what they are saying; their words make their way through emotions they still do not want or cannot express. The practice of reading is alive because writing contains the traces of the life with which it is made. If the reader does not consider this (if no one has explained it), they may think that the murky sections of the text are due to their inability to understand and not to the quality of what is written. That will surely discourage them.
Text is also alive in the sense that it can fail. A text often stumbles; it does not know how to say things. The author who intends to write something perfect finds, finishing, only achieving a few dead words. It is true that if you can develop what is called “craft,” you can master more and more the link between thought and word, between thought and written word. Still, the imperfection of the texts cannot be doubted. The great philosopher Soren Kierkegaard affirmed that not only did he have trouble understanding numerous passages when reading Hegel, but he was sure that Hegel himself had written things without understanding them.
It also happens that some readings that seem complicated at first are not so complicated. That happened to me many years ago when I tried to read the work of Rainer Maria Rilke (considered one of the great lyricists of the twentieth century, whom many know for his Letters to a Young Poet). I think, dazzled by the fact that he was one of the greatest poets, I approached him for the first time, believing I would find something complicated. And so, it was. I read it and reread it, and I did not understand anything. I made repeated attempts for several years until one day, eureka! I penetrated its meaning. I was dismayed to discover that what Rilke said was extremely simple and that something in me had deceived me from understanding it. It wasn’t that I had matured as a reader. Most of his verses were evident, as simple as the simplest that can be read. It was, yes, a resistance on my part, an obstacle I had put in my way. Resistance on my part and all those who believe that reading poetry is hopelessly complicated and that reading books is as important as it is impossible. In reality, what often happens is that you think what you are going to read is complicated, and it becomes challenging because of this.
Something similar happened to a friend who came from Sweden and spoke perfect Spanish, without any foreign accent, to the extent that one could not discern her origin when talking to her on the phone. However, she complained that many people, when they ran into her, seeing her tall stature, white skin, and blond hair, responded to her questions with things like “I do not speak English” or “Sorry, I do not understand,” before the astonishment of my friend, who could do no more than protest to them, “I am speaking in perfect Spanish!” They still didn’t understand. Yes, that’s how effective are the mirages created by our prejudices.
Regarding books, we can say that texts generally have many mirages. Seeing the text as something to our disadvantage (that is, having a wrong perception of ourselves) also makes us have a wrong perception of what we read. I will end this article with some examples in addition to one of believing that something is complicated when it is not. (By the way, even worse, the height of confusion is to think that if a text seems simple to us, it is because we do not understand it: “What? Is it that simple and clear? It can’t be. I’m probably wrong!”)
Another frequent difficulty: The text starts simply but gradually becomes complicated. I blame myself: “Sure, I couldn’t understand everything!” In reality, as we have seen, the author is looking for his own words.
Another example: In the first pages, the author claims to have written a book that is helpful and accessible to all. But we move forward, delve into the book, and do not understand anything. That has happened to me several times with popular books that promise to be accessible to all audiences. After feeling unable to understand even what all audiences understand, I concluded that it is instead the authors of these books who are not clear about the general parameters of “simplicity.”
One more case: The text flows quite clearly in the book I am reading these days. However, the author continually refers to concepts dealt with many pages prior. Since I do not remember what was said or where, the text becomes complicated for me. My conclusion? I don’t have to be concerned. It’s not that the text isn’t for me. Books like this are study books that one must reread in whole or fragments to assimilate.
Next to the last example: Bad translations. One should know that certain comprehension difficulties are due to translation. For years I tried to sink my teeth into the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by the German Ludwig Wittgenstein. It carried the warning that it was a complex text, but I did not expect that the first sentence would already be an insurmountable obstacle: “The world is all that is the case.” What did that mean? I turned the phrase over and over and didn’t understand, “…is the case.” Did it mean “that is relevant?” A few years later, I realized that the translation of my book complicated things and that, in reality, Wittgenstein’s idea was much more straightforward: “The world is everything that happens,” that is, it is what occurs. Understanding it this way, one could at least move on to the second line and understand better: “The world is not things but facts.”
I call my last example “false spoilers.” When I read the play Kean by Jean Paul Sartre, I did so with the precedent that the protagonist would commit suicide at the end. Although the dialogues were those of a philosophical comedy, I read them all as preambles to what happens when someone is going to take their life. On the penultimate page, Kean had not killed himself. Trembling with emotion, I concluded that his suicide would come at the last moment, surprisingly contradicting everything that had happened before (and revealing to me, “eager to know,” one of the keys to existentialist philosophy). But in Jean Paul Sartre’s Kean, the protagonist does not commit suicide. The end is something else. The text is, in effect, a comedy. I had read it, without understanding a word, as a completely different work.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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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 
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