Mujer leyendo con melocotones, 1923
Fuente: https://www.wikiart.org/
A good friend asked me:
“What are you reading now?”
I replied: “Nothing”.
Finally, we changed the subject and ended up telling each other bad jokes, but to complete the point, let me clarify.
Recently, I found myself really doing nothing and with nothing to read, excuse the redundancy.
When this happens to me, I look in my library to see if I can find anything interesting, and suddenly it appeared: “Nothing”.
You probably already knew this “nothingness,” but one of the few benefits of age is that everything regains the charm of being for the first time.
The truth is, it was an extraordinary discovery, and I was soon immersed in its “…air full of screams. The house full of echoes, growling like an old animal.”
“Nothing” is a novel by Catalan writer Carmen Laforet (1921-2004). She published it when she was barely 23 years old and it became a publishing success, winning the Nadal Prize. The novel denounces the moral and material misery of a bourgeois family in Barcelona after the Civil War.
I’m enjoying it as a very interesting read, and of course, it also made me reflect on that philosophical movement called Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, meaning nothing), which believes that in the end everything is reduced to nothing, and therefore nothing exists, and nothing matters. (???)
At that precise moment of bewilderment, I decided to resume the conversation with my friend, explain that “Nothing” was a very interesting novel I was rereading, and with that cleared up, we continued our session of bad jokes.
Among them was this one:
“What is something and nothing (*) at the same time?”
“The Fish,” I said.
After a brief pause and a desire to cry over the bad news, we burst out laughing.
(*) In Spanish nothing is “nada”, which also means “swim”.
Today she shares her “impulsive meditations” from Calgary, Canada, where she lives.
leonorcanada@gmail.com