Figs from a different bag

PalmSometimes, during the summer months, the hours are gray, and the sunsets cloud me, leading me to a mess that goes from me to the world, from the world to me. From the genocide in Gaza, with the images of cruelty, hunger, and massacre, to the concern for one's own life, to the uncomfortable question "what is the ethical way to live when you are a contemporary of an extermination?", but also to the small, almost inaudible questions that put my uniqueness into play, those that ignore my uniqueness; groping, without the promised compass. In the midst of this fog, I find the outstretched hand of books. I have opened the first page of The fragility of the world, by Joan-Carles Mèlich, and I have read silently that the world does not belong to us, that we must learn to live in provisionality and uncertainty.

Not everything depends on us, nor can we subject life to our interests. In fact, we control little, but this certainty gives us goosebumps and makes it difficult for us to drool. We exist in a fragile world; we are more what happens to us than what we decide. We do not have the helm of our lives, nor is there any sense to protect us. We live, as Rilke announced, always in farewell.

That is why Mélich calls for an education in this poverty, in the impossibility of appropriating the world. He confronts knowledge and wisdom, arguing that we live in an age rich in knowledge and poor in wisdom. Knowledge wants to trap the world within its categories, formulas, boxes; it wants to domesticate it. Wisdom, however, abandons conceptual prisons and lives in metaphor. Through cinema, art, music, literature, philosophy... wisdom illuminates the world with a flickering light, because it knows that ambiguity and uncertainty are insurmountable.

Now, recognizing human poverty, of finite beings who live thrown into the world, is not a call for indifference; it is a desperate defense of the world. We cannot be Oedipus who unsuspectingly fulfills the prophecy; we must know the history that has given rise to us. We live in the empire of pain; we must confront our own suffering and that of others. The present envelops the screams of horror with a thick silence, but we must unlearn the silence and find the words. Where are the words? Where can we go to look for them? Mélich is convinced that we will need to travel far back in time to see clearly.

The words that help us have a world (to call out barbarism, to continue yearning for wonder) are in libraries, those shadowy spaces that hold the world. Why read? Why narrate it? Now that the pain is so overwhelming, now that we must take action, boycott, take to the streets. Because books are not figs from another bag, they are not a privilege, an ivory tower, a parallel universe to escape our own hells. Books, filled with words that come to us from everywhere and from all times, are among the few artifacts that allow us humans to have a world.

Because when the waves come high and we are unable to see the lighthouse, there are no magic formulas, there are no certainties, knowledge is powerless to draw firm exits, but the words, which come to us like remote bottles from other seas, accompany us, they allow us to console us, they remind us.