Quarantine of Books

 

Penang. MALAYSIA – June 2018

“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading,
you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
(Haruki Murakami)

Disturbing and mocking news comes from the libraries of Rome.

While every activity is almost back to normal (it seems not for so long), from months at now, among dance floors, restaurants, matches at the stadium, buses packed like tuna cans, our dear libraries still haven't.

Yes, they are open to the public, but only upon a previous request for the book, and to take it home: in short, take-away books.

 

You cannot sit in the reading rooms and do what each book commands and needs: open it, leaf through it, penetrate it, even smell it.

No, this can be done but at home.

As happens in Japan, where the tenderness between lovers absolutely cannot be shown in public but only in the privacy of their homes.

So no lonely walks through the labyrinths of the library, looking at the colored backs of books (with green labels at the bottom) and perhaps discovering, by pure chance, the book of one's life.

I tell you a secret, I am almost fifty years old now and my parents do not read these pages, but when I was still a teenager, and I was skipping school – in Italy, we say to marinate the school, a fascinating term in the Italian language to put oil, vinegar and salt to the interrogation or assignment in class in order to preserve it, postponing it to another day – instead of going to parks or with friends on Via del Corso, I ran to the bookstore or library and spent all the hours of school there, before returning home, beautiful hiding place.

 

Let's face it, how many of us have experienced that erotic thrill (in the mythological sense of love rather than sexual) of opening the first page of a book taken at random, maybe just fascinated by its title, and not being able to take the eyes off the words that attract us to them like a black hole, of pleasure.

 

Reading is also a game of dice.

Sometimes you find insignificant books, and sometimes you find the “one”: the book, the novel, the collection of poems, which had been waiting for you for years on that shelf, watched you walk every week from afar, sulking because every time you passed them in front of him without paying any attention, and that poor book didn't even know how to do it; if it had been a story by Palazzeschi certainly the tome would have emitted a shrill whistle to call our gaze.

One wanders among those corridors full of books, which Borges called Paradise, we touch them, open, read the back covers.

You groped across the desert.

But each jewel is then only the result of our luck or intuition.

This is, for me, the pleasure of reading.

If I were to take only the book I know, I would not be able to add any new pieces to the mosaic of my knowledge.

 

There's more; and the tragic-comic side of this story comes out.

This is how a friend of mine who works in the library told me: “If you go to a clothing store, you can try on a dress, a t-shirt and then not buy it, and maybe afterward it is tried on by someone else, while with us, once the book has been returned, must be placed in a plastic bag and quarantined for ten days in a closed warehouse. Not to mention the waste of plastic bags”, she added.

Alamak! My Malaysian friends would say, which doesn't mean anything but sounds good.

It's true, who would have thought how dangerous books can be, on which we may sneeze over, at home, and then close the well-preserved bacterial load, between the pages, ready to jump out on the assault of the next victim who has the only misfortune to have our same literary tastes.

What a world! You can't trust even the best friends, the books, they don't even have the delicacy to stab you in the back, as we humans usually do, but from the front, in the depths of our rooms.

Shameless...

This is indeed a conspiracy that seems to have come from an Agatha Christie criminal plot or from a grim page by Dostoevsky.

 

If you think badly, it would seem almost a case of fear of culture.

One almost wants to bring up a high-sounding term borrowed from psychology: epistemophilia anguish, or the fear of epistemophilia (love-philia for episteme, science, knowledge).

But in the end, it's only a purely bureaucratic question of Kafkaesque memory.

But it makes you think.

 

After all, Ray Bradbury already wrote in 1953 that it was better to burn books because they are contagious.

They make men free.

READ ALSO:

• My Five Favorite Books 
• My Five Favorite Poems 
  

Italiani version