Extinción de los jardines
by Fabio MorábitoI have a friend who hardly ever reads novels and when he encounters one that he really loves, he enters into a state of great unease. Every three pages he goes out for a walk around the garden of his house, wondering how this or that situation of the story will unfold. He resumes reading and, two pages later, returns to the garden to ruminate on what he just read. The advantages of this method of reading are evident. To begin with, the exercise. My friend is in constant movement and in contact with nature. He might live a hundred years. How many novels will he have read in that time? With his method, it is likely only a dozen, which represents another advantage. Why read more? Actually, what my friend does is sabotage the end of the novels he reads. In his garden, while he strolls among the shrubs and flowers, he asks himself so many questions and considers so many possibilities for the plot that, when he finally arrives at the denouement, either he already knows it, because it is one of the solutions that he thought about beforehand, or else, after all the prospects and the paths that he explored in his mind, the end has become secondary. My friend, in summary, reads every novel as if it were an unfinished story. He reads resignedly, which allows him to immerse himself in each page as if it were the last. The key is in his garden. With a garden at his disposal where he can set read phrases out to dry, turn them over again and again, my friend can walk among the flowers while he ponders whatever action, whatever dialogue, whatever conflict between the characters. For those of us who have no such luck, we are the majority, our only garden is the end of the novel, which is the moment that our spirit will be able to get out for a walk and meditate on what it has read. Until that moment comes, you must read the story quickly, devour its pages, almost without lifting your head from the book, like workers on an assembly line or miners at the bottom of a pit. In this way, the novel, a genre that, even more than the story, is rooted in a voracious and absorbing reading, would not have emerged without the gradual extinction of gardens.
