![]() ![]() We have to understand “doctos” or “learned” not as instructive but as indispensable. That is enough, says Quevedo, provided they are “doctos”. In those days a private library consisted only of a handful of books-books were expensive-which would easily fit on two shelves. But then there come those few books, and the room becomes inhabitable. ![]() “En estos desiertos” (in these “deserts,” here translated as “solitary place”) in Spanish, names our situation with a plural noun, making of all individual rooms a vast waste land, a frightful mixture of claustrophobia and agoraphobia. ![]() We are secluded inside our homes as Quevedo was in his tower. The first poem to come to me was this magnificent sonnet by Francisco de Quevedo. Finally, some poems came, difficult, painful, but full of organic sense. I realized I had to find poems where they were waiting: in my own bag, inside my memory, in the books I am reading, in the courses I am teaching, on the table. We are experiencing a communal reality in which the word global translates into the intimate. We are like the surviving tiny people from Kripton in the Superman comics, all together, inside a global village, protected by a fragile crystal bell, after the destruction of our planet. The Greek word for this kind of action and knowledge is anagnorisis: a movement of recognition and discovery that only happens if one goes through it. And they have to care for themselves, too. They go through their daily duties under the most daring circumstances, hoping that resilience could afford some salvation. ![]() Perhaps this is exactly how doctors and nurses and cleaners experience this malady in hospitals, accompanying people to endure situations where the only future is uncertainty. Unfortunately, I do not have anything like that on my shelf, not for this. The opposite would be to act as a pharmacist behind the counter, passively waiting for somebody to come and offering them a proven cure. Finding poems for these circumstances, though urgent, cannot be done without both novelty and premeditation, like washing our hands. And like all waves, it breaks up unexpectedly, surging from an overwhelming movement and producing an incommensurable shift. This awkward moment arrived as a slow wave coming from a long distance. ![]()
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