In the excellent editions of Poets and Dragons, a writer from the south recently appeared, neither an admitted poet nor a bloodthirsty dragon, who presented himself, with his pencil ready and his sensitivity to literature measured on a scale by Vila Matas, as a strollerin the vein of a Baudelaire read by Walter Benjamin.
This gentleman, who takes a useful stroll through Literature, is called João Ventura. As in his most recent book he deals with the figure of stroller and as I spent almost the entire month of March traveling through three cities of my life, namely Strasbourg, Vienna and Paris, I began to ask myself to what extent my trip was or was not a stroll.
And the answer was no.
As much pleasure and joy as my journey gave me, it differed from the journey of a stroller in an essential element: the stroll has no goals. THE strolllike poetry, does not seek, it finds — the discoveries and experiences that are the revelations and epiphanies of these journeys without a defined purpose end up coming to mind.
Perhaps the pleasure of reading, as Daniel Pennac suggests, comes more from unplanned, unplanned readings that confront us with great revelations. But today the stroll of the youngest is done through images and computer games, and how can we get the book to enter the dreams of the youngest?
It was this question that I came across when I returned to Portugal, regarding Literature school programs. In addition to the question of whether a given author is mandatory or optional, the dilemma is another: how to make something mandatory a pleasure and an enrichment of life’s experience?
Having just returned from a trip, in which Parisian bookstores were one of the pleasures awaiting me, I don’t know how to answer that question.
Is it the parents? Do reading parents raise reading children? Not necessarily.
Is it the teachers? They should be, but will they themselves be happy reading?
It seemed to me that António Carlos Cortez was right in moving the issue from the problem of the non-compulsory reading of Saramago to the crisis of books and reading in the training of students.
The crisis is not just there. Everywhere, and in Paris too, bookstores close or we see some transform into warehouses. best-sellers (which someone in Portugal called swift beasts…).
We need to learn to face this situation and not simply join together in a wall of lamentation. What world, what civilization, awaits us? Are our grandchildren already the ones who will respond to all these challenges?
The world is too heavy for the happy lightness of stroll and for the joy of reading.
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