Lennon and McCartney
With a little help from my friends
The meeting took place in Cartagena. A lesson on Montaigne. Speaker: Francisco Jarauta, professor of philosophy. Among the audience were two listeners who listened attentively to the lecturer’s lectures, as well as professors of more or less the same subject at different universities: Javier de Lucas and Sami Naïr. I present them this way, lightly, with just bass drum and cymbal music. A proposal would emerge from that meeting: Write a book about friendship. There is nothing there. And they get to work. One condition: the common ground would be literature in its most diverse meanings. Ursula K. Le Guin writes in one of her poems: “…businessmen / say numbers, not names.” Following this maxim, the three will write their own lists of names and titles (which, in principle, do not need to be shared). And they throw themselves into that no man’s land filled entirely with writing.
It’s not easy to devise a strategy so that this thing doesn’t remain frayed, full of indeterminate scars shared by writers—or so I believe: Without conflict, there is no writing worth it. And this is where the solution (strategy) wins the first victory: Who is on the other side of the story? This thing about the interlocutor that Roland Barthes and Carmen Martín Gaite also discuss in the magnificent little book. The reading self grows to the level required by the writing self. And they do this – as repeated in the texts of the writing trio – from Rimbaud’s je est un autre and, before that, from Montaigne’s parce que c’était lui, parce que c’était moi, whom he admired.
Material selection is important to ensure that this material does not fail to bridge the gap between writing and reading. And this is not wrong at all. While Francisco Jarauta starts with Moby Dick, Heart of Darkness and Jules Verne’s novels, Javier de Lucas continues with a cast that includes important names including William Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, Conrad, Kafka, Orwell and Philip. K.Dick. And speaking of the elective intimacies that ultimately amount to any self-respecting friendship, Sami Naïr completes the list of dangerous friendships (what the heck, if writing isn’t dangerous) that occupy this book, emerging from the deepest depths of humanity. person. The names of Simone de Beauvoir (with the addition of Elizabeth Lacoin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, now Zaza), those of Edgar Morin and José Saramago appear. Examining in depth the texts that deal with Friendship as one of the fine arts, as in the best adventure novels (many of which are included in the book), means becoming the original heroes of stories that are familiar even if we know them from other readings. It seems new to us, we feel as if the music is different, very different, we see ourselves as crossing that shadow line illuminated by the enthusiastic spirit of invincible readings.
The common point (at least one of them) can be none other than inequality. Capitalism has increasingly focused on the dehumanization of humanity. So the suggestions he offers in the different and personal chapters of the book are about what brings them together to confront this inequality. The imperative need to recognize ourselves in the other. “Ahab does not imitate the whale, he becomes Moby Dick,” writes Francisco Jarauta about Melville’s novel, and at the same time leaves us one of the most extraordinary versions of Jules Verne’s already extraordinary scientific travel literature.
For Javier de Lucas, the replica seen in the movie Blade Runner, based on Ridley Scott’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is the relationship between Roy and the police officer Deckard (which he also discussed in a book on the same subject). Philip K. Dick’s novel: recognition of man in cyborg armor. How does Sami Naïr explore the complexities and exchanges of power that emerge in elective affinities (of Beauvoir, Zaza, and Merleau-Ponty) and the way in which salvation as a value is approached in the humanist propositions of Morin (“awakening of consciences”) and Saramago? The author of the text, together with the Portuguese writer’s friend and excellent biographer Fernando Gómez Aguilera, emphasizes the relationship between “political commitment and literary creation, human solidarity and beautiful humanism” in his life and work.
Three in one: Going back to the beginning of what I wrote, a wonderful proposal in a book that brings together Montaigne and Aristotle, among many others, in their framework of friendship: recognition of the other and meeting in close friendship. from good people.
Because that’s how friendship is made: between good people. What our Antonio Machado said is so that the other one, who always walks on the war foot, does not make the decisions. These are good times for the promise of a neoliberalism that leaves no stone unturned. Of course, he leaves the puppets with their necks untouched, which is necessary.
A person who never puts himself in someone else’s shoes unless it is to crush him. Therefore, as I just told you, there are books that achieve the impossible, thus proving that it is radically necessary to recognize ourselves in the other, in the other. Good results came from a meeting in Cartagena between three friends who decided to write about friendship, a very rare thing in times of rage. And not exactly like Achilles. Certainly not Achilles’…