My library

 

Literary Beauty Exercise

My library is a bookshelf the size of my desire to read. It is said that one can write with feeling and rigor only in possession of these faculties, whether visible or, on the other hand, felt. My library has a two-by-three wooden wall and a half-by-one-and-a-half base. It's not much, but it's not little, either. The wood has soft and dark lines, the nodules of the tree are several that can be detected at first glance. 

It smells like wood, feels sturdy and rustic and has several compartments for encyclopedias and oddly large books, without having to be big books. History is not only made up of great events or great victories. And encyclopedias manage to translate a number of topics that are worth condensing. That's how the publishers who publish them should think, I think. There are several shelves of various sizes, to cover, protect and highlight each book and spine, each author, each illustration so that it can be evaluated and taken at any time of the day and night. They include authors such as Shakespeare, Camões, Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Maxim Gorky, Galileo and Plato and even Jean Paul Sartre. Pepetela and Agualusa live with Nabokov and Lobo Antunes, as if they had always grown up together. There are no conflicts there, in the ranks of the books. 

The die is cast in directions where it could not have been foreseen. National authors and foreign authors, well-known and illustrious to know, all are available at my pleasure, on my shelves. And when he gives me the 31, there I go to clean the spines and arrange them on the sofa, to put them away again, to feel them, on the shelves, with some changes that they themselves don't care about. And if they do, they don't tell me anything. On my bookshelf, books are not books, but people who mix alive among the dead, ghosts among shadows of my own life and spaces  in which they were read by me. And there are a few of them, not many, where I return, without asking permission. And they tell me again, reciting and reminding me that we are made of everything, just like them, of the lived and the expected, of the known and the never glimpsed, of stories and stories, of epics and brief episodes of common life, whether in a biographical record or with collections of paintings and illustrations. Many were bought and some, quite a few, offered and that's not why they talk to me more or less. Because everyone who is there speaks to me. They cry, lament, highlight, castrate or add more to me and to my own bookshelf, which is seen casual and puffed up in the days of my 31 moments. But, the most curious thing is that my library is perfect. Not because they contain perfect books, but because they translate the life itself, the general life of everyone and the particular life of each one of us. You've had more books and they've lost both the interest, the space, and the limits of my options. Either by loss and loan, or even by clear disinvestment on my part as a reader. However, there are few who have left for these reasons. I've had to reacquire two or three immortals who didn't make it back. Now, clearly, working on the process of devaluation of having, of detachment of possession, associated with another of sharing, some go, others who will, some who will. They are considered to go, they stay. There is no formal code for those who stay. They belong to the house. That's the implicit code. Another quality of my bookshelf is that of the dungeons or gaps that open up through the touch of a certain space, where others come out and smile, another quality of literature, poetry. Kept under lock and key and touched with meticulousness. There are several authors who parade there and tell me many times about lives and senses, people and feelings stored there, perspectives and seductive personal plots. They belong to everyone and mine too. The author only created them, but creation dispossesses its creator and enlarges the lives of all those who stick their noses there. Sometimes it's the whole soul that goes in there. Like O meu pé de Laranja Lima, or o Principezinho, or Fazes-me falta or o Desassossego, Germinal and a Borboleta or Lessons in philosophy, Estorvo or Tanto barulho para nada. There's a more drying area that I've learned to love, technique, where once again the themes are mixed with the authors and this Gestalt translates my passion for subjects associated with one or several interdependent areas. Daniel Sampaio, Machado Vaz, Pio de Abreu and Óscar Gonçalves and Paulo Freire and the Dsm IV faces ICD 10 and others less limiting and more collaborative, such as the Rorschach and other projective elements. My bookshelf shines, but only I can see its brightness, through the spines where the authors' names blend with the color and the misaligned titles in bold characters. I believe I have some appreciation and care in the arrangement of authors and titles, but in fact, what practice tells me is that they are never where they were supposed to be. These are criteria that I abandon in order to take up a story or resume a reading. Although these seconds are easier to do with them, as they are hidden off the shelf, on the floor, side tables, desks, beds and corners where they promise not to linger. And they do. And I let them linger. Sometimes sipped at random or as a surprise as a gift and other times, devoured with urgency and hunger. Books can be companions on a journey. And most of them are. I understand that animals are the best companions of all worldly vicissitudes, but I also add that the book carries this feeling. How many times the eyes with immense tenderness, for all that they add to me and to others, to my perspective and to the difference it makes in the whole. On the contrary, I feel intimate with them, that I know them, that I would not inhibit myself from dialoguing with them about one or another character, one or another doubt. In fact, I am a facilitator of affections between the books and the authors. And for me, they are all great, because they share something very much theirs with the whole world and it is in this creative audacity that I like and understand them just like me. There are no appanages to a single author, no special celebrations. I think of that when I think of them, and that is all the merit, that of sharing their inner world with others. That is the greatest merit. They give themselves to those of us who read them, without any escape from the process. But my bookshelf, because it is perfect, houses everyone equally, without prejudice or discrimination. This quality in people is great, but in bookshelves it is even greater. For this reason, some bookshelves are forced to use the LIVRARIA headline. Mine doesn't. It is for private use. This bookcase sometimes grows, sometimes mingles, sometimes becomes, sometimes, the closest place to my affections. And the names dance before my eyes and create places where I have been, experiences of others, which I have appropriated. All bookshelves are more than a name, a space or a person. Until it dies (me and the bookshelf), the bookshelf, because books don't die, it will open paths, make literary roundabouts and other fictional and literal worlds. Until it disintegrates and mingles with the dust that is itself part of the book, as well as its unbearable lightness. The greatest respect and tribute one can pay to a book or an author is to read. Read the preface, the afterword, the table of contents, the front and back covers, the printed biography and poetry, the choice of the cover and the choice of sentences, dedications, the body of the book, appreciating the description of the landscapes and people that parade there, listening carefully to the stairs when they creak, the mouthless screams that echo through rooms with closed doors. And to feel between the lines the musical prelude and the musical interlude of our life or the life of others, or of ours and of others, or even of lives that are attached to us, to which we can discover motivations and shortcuts, to the smell of flowers that open when you turn an autumn page and the metaphors that are sprinkled into your eyes, defining a whole path of reading and writing influenced by a letter, any word, an incoherence or some ellipses that deepen our curiosity. Reading encourages reading. And reading adds what is not written and which may be, in the final analysis, everything that has not been heard of in a book.

Partnering with a book can be a romance or a thriller, it depends on what you need to unwind. If the movie and life limit you, it is a tool that you can use to intensify your life or simply to relax. And all books should be prescribed for medicine and health, for teases and allergies, for the promotion of everything.  And that's what I do. I prescribe myself a book for everything. May lucidity guide me while I'm here, the best anxiolytic is set to music with the sponsorship of a good book. When I open my mouth and speak, there are letters composed of words with different sentences of some intentions and interjections, but when a book opens its mouth, the world must pause. And read. And for that, all you need is your eyes and a desire that mixes with the thirst to know more. This is what I obey and thank my bookshelf.