Closing a book...out of emotion

PalmSometimes I'm incredibly lucky to be moved to unimaginable levels by the creations of others. It's a very powerful experience for me. The first time I heard the Sarabande As Handel played, a kind of physical pleasure rose from my legs to the pit of my stomach. My knees buckled, and I had to breathe deeply because I thought I was going to faint. I remember it perfectly. I must have been about 15 years old, and I was watching... Barry Lyndonby Stanley Kubrick. The film mesmerized me, and that music touched every fiber of my heart.

The same thing happened to me with The legend of the oceanic pianist, by Giuseppe Tornatore; Caesar must die, by the Taviani brothers; Novecentoby Bernardo Bertolucci; and The Great Beautyby Paolo Sorrentino. After watching these films, I was paralyzed in my chair, and I thought my head would explode because what I had seen was too much for anyone: too strong, too poetic, too brutal –yes, coincidentally, they are all Italian.

Death of Donkey, by Edvard Grieg; Tchaikovsky's violin concerto; theAdage by Samuel Barber; Palladium, by Karl Jenkins; Pasacaglia...by Handel... Just thinking about these works takes my breath away, and if I feel them, I have to close my eyes so my brain can soar in a mystical spiral.

I also perfectly remember the first time I read War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy – thanks for the advice, Professor Bujosa. I was 17 and had bought it to make a bus trip from Seville to Cádiz more bearable. The trip wasn't made any easier, it changed my life, it was an epiphany. That person spoke to me in a way that, it wasn't that I understood it, it was that I felt it within me instinctively.

Svetlana Alexievich, Philip Roth, Natalia Ginzburg, Ingmar Bergman, David Sedaris... With them I have felt so intensely that I have even forgotten where I was with one of their books in my hands. I understand that you might think it's crazy, but that's what happens to me, like a sudden impulse.

That's what happened to me today with Yelena Kostiuchenko (My beloved country. Chronicles of a lost country(The Second Periphery). I was on the train when I opened it, and after a few pages, I had to close it because the emotion was too overwhelming. I looked out the window, past which trees and different shades of green paraded by. Breathtaking.