by I was not one of those who started reading the Odyssey at school, nor did my family ever read Borges or Poe. I approached the books out of curiosity, but the others helped me persist in the activity even in the middle of the quarantine. Due to lockdown, my books became the portal to Multiple universes hidden in sheets of paper.
When I was little, my parents told me stories before going to sleep, the classics. They always prioritized the library being bigger than the TV, but I still didn’t grow up watching them read. When I told them about a new trait learned from the stories, they soon responded affirmatively, but without the same enthusiasm that I felt. Maybe they refilled my library wishing that something would prosper in me that could not in them.
Curiosity got the better of me and I soon turned to books. I started with the bright and colorful ones and as I grew older I took some without so many drawings. I kept asking for new books, and the library and I grew in size.
At ten I decided to change schools. I stood in front of the class and said my farewell. But after entering the new one, I put pressure on myself to be the best. I competed with my classmates to the point of sacrificing my enjoyment of reading. I required myself to read a greater number of books than the rest of my classmates and I began to read out of obligation. If she was going to be the odd one out in class, she should be serious.
A year before the pandemic, my Literature teacher decreed that we had to read a total of twenty books a year, something that intensified this self-demand in my reading. After this announcement, when going to pay the school fee at the Secretary’s Office, she told the administrator about the number of books she had and that she did not have that many books at home that she had not read. Her response asked me: she asked me what I liked.
By responding with “Anyone is fine,” I evaded the questions I had avoided asking for years: Did I really like reading? Or is it some kind of label that I liked to wear? I didn’t know what I liked, I read to gain the admiration of others, not for myself. I was capable of not reading the entire book, but I had to post it on Instagram. Disturbed by these thoughts, the voice of Vicky, the administrator, resounded recommending a period romance.
The next morning, after raising the flag, Vicky approached me to give me the book. It was huge, six hundred pages. It didn’t fit in the overstuffed backpack of folders and manuals, so I had to carry it in my hand. Shown with pride, as if a supernatural power was granted to me only me through that book and made me superior to those around me.
I began the book with the decision to read a certain number of pages per day. The novel captivated me so much that soon I had finished it. It was like drinking water from the fountain of youth. I resumed reading as a vice and not as a task. I became that girl again, turning page after page without seeing the number I had read.
In the summer before the pandemic, I started reading one of the books my godmother had given me. A novel that crossed a bridge between two continents that I had never managed to connect and that were intimately linked: fiction and my reality. I ventured alone in this task of linking what I read to my own life, of making those words have meaning beyond the pages.
In March the quarantine was declared. At first, in the hustle and bustle of uncertainty, I maintained the same reading pace as before: I devoured the books that Vicky lent me. I remember going clandestinely by bicycle to leave the books at home with a mask and alcohol in hand.
He devoured his books; They were the newest in the bookstores. But I was not able to link them with my life. I realized that best sellers were, for the most part, superfluous. I got bored of the monotony of the stories, of the stories without messages. I came to the conclusion that the stories in those books that Vicky lent me did not lead me to get rich, but to consume.
Out of an outburst of love for art, one day I returned his book, thanking him with a chocolate, but without asking for another. That day I decided to abandon reading, and disoriented, for months, I immersed myself in the strange world of social networks.
In quarantine, confinement and daily coexistence soon became a river in which I was drowning. The nets did nothing more than tie a stone around my neck and drown me more. I wanted to find a space that was just for me, dwhere I could unravel what I felt and lived. The only space at home was the library. Nobody at home read. So she decided to cut the rope and swim towards the freedom that books offered.
But I was already different. I didn’t want to fill myself with empty readings. I wanted to connect my life with words. So I didn’t spend on new books. I grabbed a dusty collection from the family library and put it in mine. It was a series of inherited classics with yellowish leaves that, when opened, a breeze of moldy humidity came from them. They were glued to each other from being so engrossed.
I started with the police. The contrast with reality was instantaneous. During those months, one of my father’s cousins died of a heart attack at her house. No one was able to see her even for the last time. And she wrapped in a bag, without a face and without a funeral, she was buried.
In quarantine, it didn’t matter who you were, but rather what and how you died. In the police, to solve the crime, it is necessary to know who the deceased was. Thus, the detective reveals the true cause of death in warm and close details. I think that Sherlock Holmes would have said that my father’s cousin died from heart problems. and his tobacco addiction, while a pandemic doctor maintained that it was due to covid.
Some time later, after five months in a world where the garden of my house became a nest of sun and stars, and also the only contact with nature, Jules Verne and his travels from one pole to the other knocked on my door . Faced with oppression and unjustified confinement, I decided to embark on purely justified adventures. I appreciated the detailed descriptions of the operation of the submarine or the ship that took it to the moon.
The travels in this literary galaxy motivated me to continue despite the confinement. Physically I couldn’t travel, but the mind is stronger than the legs. For an hour I could be part of Captain Nemo’s underwater team as it crossed the South Pole, even though my feet couldn’t cross the bridge to visit my grandmother or my friends.
This made me feel alone at times. The kind of loneliness that is deeper than the physical presence of another. I needed real friends, who wanted to listen, even if it was over Zoom. In quarantine I learned who my friends were and who were not, and out of simple acceptance I decided to distance myself from everyone. In this whim of “I don’t need anyone” I turned to reading Robinson Crusoe, this way I would strengthen my ideas.
The novel elucidated that it was possible to survive alone. But it made me reflect on the great difference in meaning between surviving and living. Living fully meant for me to find what Robinson found: a meaning to his shipwreck. Robinson justified his survival with the firm conviction of telling his compatriots (he even went so far as to tell the cannibals) the cause of his companions’ deaths from abortion. It was openness to others, even his enemies, that led Robinson to survive.
Be open to others, without expecting anything, without believing yourself inferior or superior to the “cannibals.” That’s what I learned. Not everyone has to listen to me, not everyone has to love me, because not everyone can be friends. Given these reflections, my godmother recommends “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl.
The reading of the shipwreck was deepened with Frankl. Through his story in Auschwitz I also saw my confinement. But this time, it was no longer the external prison that bothered me, but the internal one. It was shrouded in a morning fog. There was light, but I didn’t know where it came from. I couldn’t find the sun that illuminated my life and gave it meaning.
By knowing myself, I found in myself an irreproachable truth that accompanied me in the face of the lack of friends. By being the possessor of this good, I opened myself to others. It was this openness that led to others also wanting to open up to me and so I formed a few bonds, but all of them were sunk in the Styx.
Before the pandemic I had only had one date with a boy. He was the complete opposite of me; I did not like it. I agreed to go out with him to prove to my friends that I wasn’t a nun. Once he kissed me I didn’t speak to him again. I told my friends and the matter ended there. At that time, my grandmother had given me a Jane Austen book.
In the face of my immaturity, Jane articulated to me the difficulties that, as a woman, I go through to love. Jane approached the men from a distance. Immersed in a world where the deepest acts of love were a like or a message, Lizzy Bennet revealed to me two hundred years before that the true bond is not built frivolously by responding to a calculated image, full of filters. Quite the opposite. Love is built by accepting the full face, each of the virtues and defects of the other. Their prejudices and pride.
Gradually, the quarantine ended and I had to return to the world. I had classes with the Literature teacher again. Until then, something he had told us in the first year had seemed headless to me: that each text is a fabric of others. After the classics, my perspective changed. Now I understand it.
The classics revealed to me that written words can be a bridge where the finite pace of man on this earth intersects with mine and leaves a point, a technique or idea that lengthens, thickens and colors the fabric of my life, making it incorruptible for me every vocabulary. It was these immortal sketches that made a pandemic teenager see that, to understand the world, a rereading was necessary.
Ana Clara Peternelj. He is a student of Social Communication at the Austral University. She is eighteen years old, of which ten she dedicated to the study of the violin. She is the oldest of four siblings and lives in Luján. Her taste for books and classical music contrasts with her highly social character and she talks about herself with anyone she meets on the street. She wants to be able to graduate and continue studying; She is fascinated by research. Since she was a girl scout for eleven years, she enjoys spending time in nature, but she doesn’t like to get dirty. Every Sunday she goes to mass with her family and then she goes to work at an ice cream shop in a nearby town. Her favorite taste is pistachio.
