Elogio de la fragilidad

In Praise of Fragility, Gustavo Martín Garzo brings together short texts in which he talks about the works and creators that have fascinated him and in which he vindicates the need for art in our lives. These texts speak of reading as an act of creation, perhaps the most intimate and unpredictable that exists. It is not read hoping to obtain an answer to the question of who we are, but to see what happens to us, what we become. The question that the reader asks the book is the question of the little mouse in the story: 'What will you do to me at night?' To read a book is to fall, like Alice, through the hollow of a tree and to learn to love questions, before being able to answer them. Settling for 'half the knowledge'. Only those who do, and do not seek an immediate explanation for what is happening, can sit down to tea with the Hatter and the March Hare without caring too much not to understand much of what he hears. To read is to discover, as they say in The Great Gatsby, that 'the rock of the world is firmly seated on the wings of a fairy'. That is what books are, something like the abodes of mysticism, the floating castles of chivalric novels or the forests in which lovers take refuge in medieval legends. A bridge between the dream world and real things. The tree whose fruits our first parents dared to eat was a tree of words. And the reader is nothing but that 'rampant baron' who, living among its leaves, feeds on its intangible fruits.