What is more exciting than traveling by letting the imagination fly through the books. Learn, dream, have fun, cry, think ... There are so many things that can give us the letters, that any baby should come with a book under his arm.
Today I want to rescue a fragment of Vargas Llosa's speech on the occasion of the delivery of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2010. A text that I had already read at the time, but now I remember because, perhaps, today I need a little more literature in my life and I believe more strongly that books should be part of any child's growth.
The words of the writer realize the importance of reading in his life. And in those childhood memories, who are linked to the books? The school, the teachers, the parents, the family.
I wish many other people knew how to express ourselves as well as him, because I'm sure that same feeling of thank parents or teachers for loving books It is very shared.
I learned to read at the age of five, in the class of Brother Justiniano, at the Colegio de la Salle, in Cochabamba (Bolivia). It is the most important thing that has happened to me in life. Almost seventy years later I remember clearly how that magic, translating the words of the books into images, enriched my life, breaking the barriers of time and space and allowing me to travel with Captain Nemo twenty thousand leagues of underwater travel, fight alongside d 'Artagnan, Athos, Portos and Aramís against the intrigues that threaten the Queen in the days of the winding Richelieu, or dragging me through the bowels of Paris, turned into Jean Valjean, with Marius's inert body in tow. Reading turned dream into life and life into dream and put within reach of the little piece of man that I was the universe of literature. My mother told me that the first things I wrote were continuations of the stories I read because I was sorry they were finished or I wanted to amend the end. And that is what I have spent my life doing without knowing it: prolonging in time, as I grew, matured and aged, the stories that filled my childhood with exaltation and adventures. I wish my mother was here, she used to get excited and cry reading the poems of Amado Nervo and Pablo Neruda, and also the grandfather Pedro, with a big nose and shining bald head, who celebrated my verses, and Uncle Lucho who encouraged me so much to turn my body and soul to write although the literature, in that time and place, will feed their farmers so badly. I've had people like this all my life, who loved me and encouraged me, and they gave me their faith when I doubted. Thanks to them and, without a doubt, also, to my stubbornness and some luck, I have been able to dedicate a good part of my time to this passion, vice and wonder that is to write, to create a parallel life where to take refuge against adversity, which becomes natural the extraordinary and extraordinary the natural, dissipates the chaos, beautifies the ugly, eternalizes the moment and turns death into a passing spectacle (…)
Not many of our children will be writers bringing their passion for reading to this way of life. But surely many will love the magic of words, of drawings, surprises on each page, the pleasure of falling asleep with a book in their ears, imagining those dream worlds that will visit them during the night ...
Before they learn to do it alone, reading stories to our children makes us accomplices, it is a source of immense wealth and pleasure. Therefore I hope tonight, despite the fatigue, find that place for a story.
