As I write this, Salman Rushdie is still undergoing surgery, wounded in the abdomen and neck with a knife that has been sharpened for years. I do not wish to know the name of the insane attacker, nor the details of his daring deception; I just hope the anesthesia allows Rushdie to envision new plots and characters that will come together in his next novel or essay. I also wish – foolishly – that the episode would stop being a tragedy and become a real warning of the unforgivable seriousness that comes with any assault on free speech, on illuminating the intangible. Namely what we call literature with capital letters and which – engraved on stone, paper or sieve – is the only thing that saves us.
Just yesterday a madman died in defeat trying to burn himself in defense of already proven criminal, clown and pretender Donald Trump, and daily we are harassed by bombardments of terrifying stupidity, unbridled lies, rampant violence and other misfortunes, but that has Reaching the jugular vein of an author, the dagger drawn more than three decades ago by the religious fanaticism of an insane populace (which, without reading it, had already condemned it) is inevitable proof of the barbarity that persists in this world . The same world that 30 years ago had neither cell phones nor the Internet, only ATMs and fax machines that retired telexes. This world where a writer’s life changed forever.
Well, read it! Now more than ever: read! For those who have already done it: read it again!, as a vigil and homage, encouragement and affirmation that there is no weapon that can defeat the magical universe of literature. I’m not talking about the Hello Kitty exhortation to embrace the good waves and tenderness to accept that the bloody climate and unbridled crime will vanish forever when you put a book in the hands of criminals – with hugs and not bullets; No! I am saying that reading and re-reading is necessary precisely because there are terrorists and religious leaders who take the fatwa for the verses they have read, for the holy book which they mistakenly justify death carry with you, enact. You must read Rushdie to know a scholar without pedantry, prose illuminated by the grace of (not clown) humor. He is a writer striving to understand the bridges that bridge the distances between cultures and landscapes… a voracious reader whose essays are pure, walking thought, pure and simple, and an unforgettable smile that lingers in deserves only silence at this moment. Excuse the blur, the screen seems to be flooded because the pen is crying.
Let all feathers weep in that heated moment, when a bard’s hypnotic voice and strabisch gaze, as it were, light up the night like shooting stars, like Perseids in the black night of dementia, where better days must just be fertilized with drops of ink salty, with which only tries to underline admiration and gratitude for all the writers and so many authors who in every paragraph of their stories and in every verse of their paragraphs give their soul, the pentagram of lines in which a man’s heart rhythm hovers letters, syllables and sounds of Silences who should never have suffered the slightest irrational harassment or the present attack for curdling the high pleasure of writing.
‘Cry My Pen’Jorge F. Hernández
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