Overnight, it has sprung up on me a swelling in the right elbow, a soft bulge to cushion the ulna, a protrusion that looks like the chin of Fournier’s joker or the chin of a court jester. Hurt doesn’t hurt, but what’s the point of the bump if he didn’t hit me? Doctor Google suggests that it could be an “olecranon bursitis”, a inflammation of the synovial bag due to recurrent microtrauma, a common injury in people who “repetitively rest the joint on a hard surface.” I mean, the table. The ailment is also known as “student’s elbow,” and immediately the joy of the rejuvenating phrase exerts a soothing placebo effect on the bruise. In the background, we are students until the end of days.
There are those who read in the wing chair, but in my case, except in the pages prior to sleep, I usually sit at the desk, elbow bent and forehead resting on the palmperhaps because I have better light and pencils to underline and write in the margins. Others prefer the bed, like Josep Pla; It was so cold in Llofriu’s ‘mas’, that he gave himself up between the sheets to the only liniment that consoled him in old age, along with guilty alcohol: “Reading is the only thing that excites me, that makes me live,” he notes in his diary on June 8, 1956.
Escape and food
Right now I don’t remember who said that reading is the only joint that never or almost never fails. The discovery of books as a passport to another place explodes in adolescence, when a safe-conduct is most needed to escape from an incomprehensible world, until the habit ends up becoming almost a pathology (“girl, turn off the light at once” ). Then, over the years, it becomes a habit that feeds, like bread and meat. Escapism and nutrition are not exclusive functions.
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The Argentinian Allan Pauls has wondered about the strange phenomenon: how is it possible that reading, a sophisticated invention of culture, get to collect necessity status, of “organic compulsion”, almost as one of the basic biological functions. So much so that he recognizes that, in part, he writes as the ‘payment’ of an “infinite debt” with reading, that “free, beneficial, generous vice”, almost fanatical. Pour these confessions into a book called ‘Trance’ that was recommended to me the other day at theThe Lata Peinada bookstore, specialized in Latin American literature. It bears the stamp of the Argentinian publisher Ampersand, within a collection of essays that, under the heading ‘Reader&s’, invites writers to reflect on the reading experience. We will have to track them down.