I leave this here without passing judgment, more out of laziness than neutrality. It has been two years since Luna Miguel read in public for 48 consecutive hours. In silence. In her pajamas. Surrounded by books, like a secular altar. The gesture was observed, recorded, commented on… and then finished off by the usual squad of keyboard comedians who have undoubtedly read too much. Or too little. You never know.
Once again, the act of reading becomes an installation. A liturgy for the converted. Another scene from the eternal return of “look at me, I’m sick,” only this time with a desk lamp, a copy of Jane Eyre, and a water bottle. More than a tribute to reading, it seemed like an exhumation of the reader.
Personally, I have my reservations about the mandate to read as a spiritual exercise or intellectual gymnastics. I’m not as anarchist as Aira, but promoting reading as a moral duty fills me with as much enthusiasm as a TED talk on the power of hugs. Do we really still think that reading for the sake of reading saves us from something?
There is no school that teaches pleasure, let alone the pleasure of reading without purpose. Borges put it better: we approach books out of some mysterious loyalty. Not because someone is timing us from a folding chair.
The interesting thing was not so much the performance as the reaction: a parade of lazy jokes and cheap sarcasm. As if reading for 48 hours were more ridiculous than spending the same amount of time scrolling through videos of people folding T-shirts on an endless loop. Perhaps the “and survives” in the headline of the Spanish newspaper El País at the time does not refer to physical effort, but to the attack of collective banality that fell upon her.
I met Luna Miguel through her translation of El libro de Monelle, that gem written by Schwob after the death of a prostitute and which is, yes, about pleasure. Not useful pleasure, but useless, dense pleasure, of being with someone or something out of pure desire. Miguel is a restless, consistent reader, with more books on her shelves than many of her detractors have furniture.
Gabriel Zaid said that, since he began reading, life seemed to him a series of interruptions. Well, this was the opposite. An interruption to the interruptions. A spiritual retreat in WiFi code. And perhaps also a desperate attempt to ask the world to please be quiet for a moment.
Perhaps this performance was simply the wet dream of the “idle reader” that Cervantes invoked with irony and tenderness. And in that case, forgive us for being solemn: some dreams deserve to be taken seriously.
