Don't You Dare To Think Out Loud!

October sunrises arrive late because, until the coming weekend, they simply do not decide to set back the clocks. Every year they promise that this seasonal turn will be the last, and every year—back in October and forward in March—they keep shifting the hands. We remain subjects governed by proven incompetents and hustlers, while the best and the brightest are far too busy giving free rein to their greed.

For that very reason, I do what I can so that filthy mediocrity does not splash me, thinking of October as a lazy month, humid and ever hotter. In this little beach town where I stitch words together, it is no scene of Magical Realism to see, on the main street, the smoke from the roasted chestnut and sweet potato stand intertwine with the queues at the Italian ice cream parlor.

If it were up to me, I would make October last forever because I am furiously productive and the visionary within me is operating at peak form. So I try to stitch my freewheeling thoughts and some hardcore truths, thinking that once the cold arrives I will have time enough to edit—though at times I think that editing is sheer cowardice, a concession to the censors of official groupthink.

When one has enjoyed the fortune of living a long life and, in turn, seen successive generations of censors pass by, one recognizes all the tricks of semantic dilution inherent in political correctness.

Homage to Catalonia, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Shooting an Elephant and Other Essays demonstrate the obtuse need of power to turn thinking into a low-flying flutter.

Who wants us so idiotic? Who instills in us the fear of the inner voice? Perhaps ourselves? Are we so frightened to think out loud?

These questions were lingering in my mind while I was watching the before and after of a phenomenal American actress, Frances Louise McDormand, in two films spanning thirty years: Mississippi Burning and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Even though I had seen both movies back in the day, displays and sound have improved so much that I had the impression it was my first time watching them, a feast far more interesting than alternating Italian ice creams with roasted chestnuts and sweet potatoes—as frumpy housewives do to appease children they do not even bother to discipline, busy as they are with doom-scrolling or recording messages with an iPhone held out like a slice of toast with jam.

McDormand is an actress of chiseled features with a cleft chin, a horsy beauty that bucks and kicks out of pure despair. There is a scene in Ebbing where she dishes out kicks to the groin equally to boys and girls because, out of sheer cowardice, they threw their milkshake at her car’s windshield. But there are so many other scenes in that movie that listing them would exceed the scope of these lines. Suffice it to say that in Mississippi Burning she plays the exact opposite role: a woman married to a racist cop whom she covers for despite herself.

I would bet that Martin McDonagh wrote Ebbing as a bespoke gift for McDormand—a gift I envy since, in novels, it is the imagination of the generous reader that does the casting. And there is little generosity while reading on the diagonal for unmentionable reasons of laziness; all the more reason to bet on oral storytelling.

It goes without saying Mississippi Burning was painted with a broad brush: highly sensationalistic, at times even comical when it tries to be tragic. Or as critics often say when referring to the lack of skill in inept drama: pathos verging on bathos.

By the way, in Ebbing it was not McDormand but Sam Rockwell who made me truly laugh, playing Dixon—a racist, useless, torturing cop who nonetheless possesses redeeming qualities that only the accumulation of his blunders and a letter from the beyond manage to unlock.

I am convinced that human kindness is equally distributed, provided one awakens from mental laziness. And art that does not awaken kindness is not art, but something far more sinister destined for a state of constant stupefaction. I could search for a name for it, but dawn has just broken and I want to go for a run so as not to lack breath when it comes time to record this podcast upon returning from the lighthouse.

I am also convinced, without a shadow of a doubt, of everyone’s innate capacity to fill the gaps in thought with the wonder of intelligence. Even when we hear the voice of the Orwellian Big Brother hollering, “Don’t You Dare to Think Out Loud!”

Then the weekend arrives and the late October sun that had warmed the coastal light gives way to a dark, relentless downpour. Sitting in front of my Flemish triptych, listening to the water drum like a tambourine against a nearby corrugated asbestos roof, the realization hits home: the musings written in the glow of dawn were far too pristine, too gentle—a castle of sand built on the illusion of human kindness. I had longed to believe in the best version of myself while running to the lighthouse, but reality does not dwell in the high towers of thought. It waits in the heart of the European continent.

The screens flicker to life and the panic of the press floods the room like a burst dike. From Paris, the news comes not of philosophical debates or noble student marches, but of a dark tide rising from the miserable fringe of the banlieues. No, you are not Gaza’s children. You are spoiled children. Where are the professional mourners of Instagram and the television sets now? Just a fortnight ago, they were weeping before “this little light facing a country adrift”. And then a town hall burns down, streets are trashed, and they vanish into thin air.

The intellectuals—that pure, and true, and hardline left of journalists, comedians, and commentators—rush to endorse what they romanticize as a formidable citizen mobilization. They excuse everything, pretending that the chaos is the legitimate voice of rebellious youth. In the name of distant geopolitical grievances, hooded and masked figures hiding their colored skin, because they are unmistakably Moors and Blacks, ransack storefronts to fish iPhones out of shattered glass.

Paris becomes a maze of smoke and running shadows. Down in Limoges, the clock tower of the nineteenth-century town hall groans under the heat of a targeted fire and collapses into a mountain of glowing brick and shattered slate. The sinister algorithms of Musk’s X feed on the fall like a pack of African wild dogs, eager for a cheap rerun of Notre-Dame’s collapsing spire.

In the alleys behind the grand boulevards, the looters strip away the pretense of civilization. The hooded and masked Moors and Blacks of the banlieues are here, shattering the laminated glass of boutiques not with a clean break, but with the heavy, dull crunch of cracking ice. Luxury handbags crafted for the über-rich, lined with velvet and meant for quiet drawing rooms, are dragged through the greasy water of gutters. Silks intended for galas where men drink champagne in tuxedos are torn on iron grates.

By midnight, the violence shifts from the street to the screen. The disenfranchised sit in damp, concrete rooms, lit only by the cold blue glare of their smartphones. They photograph a three-thousand-euro leather backpack fished straight from a shattered display window, offering it on Vinted for three hundred euros in cash. They type out quick, casual messages to prospective buyers: “No receipt, cash only, pick up before dawn.” The luxury item is instantly hollowed out of its prestige, reduced to digital currency, flipped in real time like stolen scrap metal.

The pack of African wild dogs begins its feast, the talking heads who had been waiting in the fringe step into the bright lights of the television studios. They smile with the cold satisfaction of those whose terrible predictions have come true. Look where your noble ideals have brought you. You will be swept away by the far right, for whom you constantly hold the ladder. Like goddamn useful idiots. Look at the gifts of your open arms and your soft hearts: broken glass, burning towers, and masked mobs claiming your streets.

The rain outside my windowpane grows heavier still, and I have to lower the blinds. The tears of angels are washing away the world as if Heaven itself were crying over the ruins. The musings written in the warmth of the morning sit frozen on the three dark-mode monitors of my Flemish triptych. On the central monitor, the original—the idealist morning on one page, the burning continent on the other—leaves nothing left to add.

I tried my best to be somebody you’d be close to. But the illusion of human kindness burns in the flames like crackling logs; all that remains is the cold, ancient truth: the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

When I am divorced from reality, I wind up watching only broken display windows and the irrepressible march of those f*****g barbarians. And don’t you dare tell me lies, please: these people came here as cheap labor so others could have a bigger boat to show off—the bottomless greed that has ruined every civilization before. If they hate so much the Western civilization, maybe it’s about time for Moors and Blacks to leave Europe and get back to Africa where they belong. Whether by choice or by force.

I step back into the silence of the recording studio, recline in the ergonomic chair, and let the noise of the world fade. I’ll have to wait for the rain to clear up before recording inside the matryoshka. But first, I need a hard copy for the lecturer.

That Young Sailor—who by no coincidence then answered to the name of Javier—was signed on aboard Leviathan, a sailboat just over a hundred feet in length: a job he considered from the very start an outright steal for what he intended to do with his brand-new life, a favor offered him by his twinkling fate, and one where, by his own choosing, he was already secluded at the time, studying Comparative Literature on his own.

It was a lot of sailboat for a single man—a wooden-built classic gleaming with varnishes, bronzes, and abundant rigging. However, that Young Sailor, who most of the time passed for a freak given his striking extravagance, was actually a seasoned airborne veteran who still retained the martial demeanor worn for years, since he was honorably discharged just a few months ago.

Philippe Leroy, the shipowner, had met Javier at a soirée held on a rooftop along Barcelona’s Rambla with killer views, arranged by a French expat, Adrien Joffre, whom every last soul knew, judging by the turnout and the constant stream of people on the building’s ancient staircase.

Besides serving Catalan wine in abundance—especially the hairy grenache—Adrien had set up a Brazilian-style barbecue, also known as picanha, which would at least prevent all that wine from landing on an empty stomach. As was the rule on such occasions, at least among friends, when Fatboy Slim’s music began booming through the speakers and the dancing got underway, the one who wound up turning the meat over the mesquite embers was the only one capable of staying sober and skillful amid the mounting chaos: the ever-watchful Javier.

As night fell over the nearby silhouette of Montjuich promontory, a moon on which could be spotted with the naked eye the ash of its shadowed face ended up tragically impaled on the slender Calatrava Tower, in the manner of an olive that at the bottom of a glass of dry Martini rests, a magical moment when Philippe arrived, in the midst of his inseparable cloud of smoke—a chain-smoker like few others—accompanied by a woman of bewildering beauty whom there were who took for Helen of Troy herself, though the name of that Parisian model was in all truth none other than Malou Guex.

Drawn by savory aromas, Malou proved somewhat demanding toward Javier, asking him for ever thinner slices of the picanha, because, despite it being an early June night, he was dressed head to toe in stark black, and without the slightest malice she came to mistake him, in the first instance, for part of a catering service—something altogether normal for a model accustomed to crowded events—though nor did he do anything other than give her whatever she asked for without a word of complaint, provided he could savor in quiet delight her Parisian splendor.

As soon as the host, Adrien Joffre, stepped over to check that part of the terrace to make sure all was well, he in passing dispelled that understandable misunderstanding and formally introduced them; instead of slinking off embarrassed for having taken such liberties and vanishing for the rest of the night, she stood staring at him fixedly for a full minute without saying a word, and straightaway went in search of Philippe Leroy, who, utterly detached from the bustle of the party, was smoking leaning on his elbows against the terrace parapet overlooking the Rambla, lost in thought as he watched the very young African hookers offering b******s to overly drunken tourists for peanuts.

“Haven’t you noticed that guy?” she said, agitated. “It’s Patrick come back to life!”

“Who, Adrien?” Philippe said. “You’re wrong. I met him at a party two years ago. I think it was at Samantha Rowles’ place in Ibiza, though I can’t quite remember now.”

“No, Philippe,” Malou insisted. “The guy tending the barbecue. My hair is still standing on end! Go on, get over there and don’t make a scene.”

Upon confronting Javier, Philippe noticed the astonishing physical resemblance to his brother, who had recently died of an overdose. He barely managed to ask in a low whisper, as if expecting this double to clear his doubts:

“Patrick? Are you supposed to be here?”

Of course, with Fatboy Slim still booming through the speakers, Javier could only read his lips, point to his ears to signal he couldn’t hear a thing, and go right back to his business: tending to the hungry crowd hovering around the fire waiting their turn.

When Philippe managed to gather himself after the thrill, by dint of sharp elbowing and securing a spot beside the embers, he finally managed to strike up a conversation with Patrick’s surprising doppelgänger, and they even shared a few laughs all together when Malou joined in, at the expense of the supposed catering service, an opportunity Philippe seized on the spot to suggest meeting up early the next day to go sailing on his sailboat and so get to know each other better, since they couldn’t really talk much in all that din anyway, an invitation Javier gladly accepted—though at the time he was completely ignorant of who the hell Patrick was—always ready to join in any kind of adventure, such was his temperament, since he had no attachments of any kind, nor did anything stir fear in him, and whatever mischief he committed, even those that tempted his fate, inexplicably, he landed on his feet.

★★

The morning that followed the successful and well-attended soirée, having scarcely slept a wink, because all of a sudden he woke up in a stranger’s bed and in the sweet company of some girl, yet outfitted with his inseparable backpack stuffed with books, notebooks, and a mere two changes of clothes, Javier strode up the Rambla in long strides, until reaching the commuter station beneath Catalonia Square and stepped aboard the first train bound for the marina Philippe Leroy had indicated—none other than in Arenys de Mar, out in the back of beyond, halfway to the Costa Brava.

Having completed the commute in no time flat—for he cleverly took advantage of the hypnotic rattling to catch a little bonus sleep—he walked toward the eastern breakwater of that luminous marina sheltered beneath a decomposed granite hill, where that mighty Leviathan was finishing its annual maintenance work alongside the shipyard quay, which proved easy for him to distinguish in the distance, standing out among the crowded fleet of sailboats, for it was rigged with a huge wooden mast with four spreaders, at whose masthead a cormorant sat perched in that priceless moment, unfurling the full wingspan of its black wings to dry them in the sun and breeze.

Perhaps he was superstitious, on account of that cormorant and because right then and there he promised himself he would do whatever it took—something would surely occur to him on the fly—just to sign on to that massive sailboat; lucky as he was, it proved easy enough, for as luck would have it, that very morning Phillipe’s old sailor had quit on him, citing no other reason than that he was no longer at an age to be away from home for so many days at a time.

“I told him when I hired him that I sail in the spring,” Philippe told him while showing him the layout of the varnished wooden cabins. “It seems the salary I paid him punctually and the light workload weren’t enough for him.”

Javier slipped off the heavy backpack from his shoulders with a swift gesture when they emerged onto the deck, after completing their tour below deck of Leviathan, and nimbly improvised an unbeatable sales pitch, gesticulating with both hands, his palms purposefully turned toward his companion, knowingly punctuating his words with an honest and open body language:

“With a sailboat of this size, you need an onboard sailor, of course—but not someone with a family and kids, since they’ll naturally want to sleep at home every chance they get. You need someone single, like me.” At this point, he dropped his voice as low as possible so the ensuing promise stayed strictly between the two of them: “I assure you that with me you’ll never have that kind of trouble, because being alone to study fits me like a glove. And naturally, you’ll have everything ready to hoist the sails whenever you feel like it.”

“Well, you can stay right now if you want the job,” offered the owner. “I think Patrick’s clothes and shoes, which I still keep in the lockers, will fit you; they are still brand new, because there was no way to get him to come. I’m leaving you a credit card for expenses: laundry and whatever else you need. I hardly ever come, save for my habit of snorting speedball”—he confessed openly as he lit a cigarette—“in case you didn’t know, equal parts of coke and heroin. So I usually spend most of the year secluded in Lausanne, where I have a hospital and a spa nearby to recover from the ravages. Make yourself comfortable: your cabin is aft. I’m going to the boatyard office for a moment to pay the bill they gave me this morning, and if the weather forecast permits, we set sail in an hour.”

Malou Guex was quietly eating her breakfast over in the spacious galley, this time her fair skin radiant in every wisp of light filtered through the crimson curtains of the portholes, her jet-black hair pulled up into a messy high bun, and showing no signs of a hangover save for full lips tinged perhaps with morning languor, as though the previous night’s celebration had not in the least diminished her natural beauty.

When Philippe disembarked and the two were left alone, Malou approached Javier with extreme familiarity—as if they had been lovers in another life as well as this one—to offer him a pastry tray full of fluffy butter croissants.

Then, with a help-yourself gesture, she pointed to the countertop where a small jug of creamer sat and, resting on the stove—swung on gimbals between two metal pins to safely handle the sailboat’s heel—the moka pot was beginning to gurgle. Javier took the moment to pour himself a cup of fresh coffee.

She stood so close that, despite the aroma of coffee, his sense of smell caught the subtle, rich, and sweet notes of her body scent, with traces too of a light morning perfume, notes carried on the sea breeze that stole in through the portholes and the hatch opening onto the deck; unless he cast his eyes down or simply looked away, with two eyes in his head there was no way the model’s magnificent body could have escaped his notice, dressed only in a long t-shirt that clearly bore no bra underneath at that early hour, unsettling his senses further still—senses already quite tormented as it was, above all his hearing, for Malou Guex spoke a Parisian French that seemed to him, at that exact moment, like a harmonious trilling:

“So welcome aboard,” Malou said with a massive, split-face grin—so extraordinary it stretched all the way back to her first molar, while the quick flutter of her gaze turned into a glint of emeralds. “Philippe didn’t hesitate to lay out his vice for you. But you haven’t told him yours, and if we’re going to set sail together, it’s only fair we know. Don’t you think? As a rule, we share everything here: the good and the bad. That way we spare ourselves the nasty surprises that, out at sea, take on a dimension they certainly don’t have on land. Trust me on this, Javier: the difference is night and day.”

“I’ll gladly tell you,” Javier promised. “But you ought to remember I’m no ordinary guest—I’ve just signed on as crew. Simply so I know where I stand, I’d like an honest answer to a question that’s been spinning in my head since yesterday, when Adrien Joffre introduced us and you went struck stone silent out of nowhere—for reasons I still can’t figure out.”

“Fire away,” she said. “Don’t go playing the timid, modest type when you’ve just signed on with a guy you don’t even know.”

“I’m not shy,” he said, “but the question I’m about to ask needed your leave first, and you’ve just given it to me—namely: are you Philippe’s partner, or are you two just good friends?”

“We had our moment,” Malou Guex replied without a trace of malice, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Now we’re good friends, because his real partner is speedball. If you’ve ever known anyone like him, you know damn well what I mean. Any woman who honestly believes she’s the partner of a junkie—even a young, charming billionaire like Philippe—is either a seasoned courtesan or a hopeless romantic.” She paused here to take a quick sip of her café au lait. “I met him in Paris five years ago, back when he was an Adonis and every girl in town was competing for him. I assure you that by now, after all the heartbreaks I’ve swallowed, I take him just as he is. Right now he’s on a springtime respite with methadone, which is why I agreed to come along strictly as a sponsor. I’m glad you signed on, Javier. Truly. Knowing you’re sailing with us, at least he won’t make me his prisoner...”

And then her fingers came to rest on his wrist, collapsing whatever safety margin Javier had left against a beauty like hers. Yet that didn’t mean she had forgotten her question; on the contrary, she pressed him again:

“By the way... what’s your vice?”

“I suppose being a hopeless daredevil,” he said, finally finishing off a delicious croissant, adding as he chewed with his mouth full: “And now, I reckon you’re going to tell me yours, Malou.”

“More than a vice, it’s a curse I can’t shake off no matter how hard I try,” she said, her brow furrowing in genuine sorrow. “Like an odious goddess or, if you prefer, a diffuse muse—since the order of the factors doesn’t change the outcome—I have power enough to bewitch any man I set my mind to, with the exception of Philippe. Now you know why.”

“The billionaire, the goddess, and the daredevil,” he summarized. “It seems I shall have to be prudent from now on however much it costs me. What a fine mess I have gotten myself into! Perhaps I manage to return alive and tell the tale: it will suffice that I carry a talisman that actually serves to ignore your condition or manage to take refuge in a healthy vice like reading, the only reason why I have signed up, I confess to you.”

Malou showed her molars once again in that exceedingly wide smile, in the manner of a true goddess, perhaps the one born from the froth of the seas, well versed in the beaux-arts of enchantment, beguilement, and total bewitchment.

“You certainly lack no self-confidence,” she said, cracking up at him: “it gladdens me to know there will be someone on board with whom I can count on to have a bit of fun. Cool!”

Philippe’s footsteps echoed across the deck after sorting out his business at the boatyard. He started the engine on the first try, which inspired confidence, as most classic sailboats were a real headache when it came to starting them up, always spluttering badly and sometimes needing a proper, full-blown engine bleed.

Javier went to leave his backpack in the aft cabin, he opened the spacious locker with varnished mahogany drawers to neatly arrange his books, notebooks, pencils, ink bottles, and his ever-present fountain pen; he put on the foul-weather gear that Philippe had offered him, who, by the way, had a good eye for sizes, and finally adjusted the strap of his sunglasses before heading up to the deck, lest they fall into the water during a dynamic maneuver with sails and lines such as a tack.

As soon as they cast off the lines and left behind the boatyard pier, they exited through the spacious mouth of the marina; among the three of them—for Malou showed herself to be well versed in seamanship—they helped one another hoist the massive mainsail on that four-spreader mast and the jib, as they brought the sailboat head-to-wind along the course indicated by the flags.

Philippe switched off the engine and nothing else was heard in the sudden silence save the music of the wind, interwoven with the sweet melancholy of those sighs brought on by the occasional sprays of froth, as though perhaps that Leviathan at long last blew, freed from its moorings, and displayed in its elegant heel all that it was truly capable of.

Once upon a time there was Michael Morris, a professor trying to instill at eight in the morning a sliver of love for novels in a bunch of teens, who were either yawning with sleep or simply not paying attention. Because the rush of hormones disturbed them terribly within the shadow of young girls in flower. I was one of his students, stuck there and convinced that no one was going to teach me anything relevant about literature, given that I had been an avid reader since childhood.

As for the beauty sitting by my side, Mary Palmer, I let her write in the margins of the textbook the word “sleepy” as many times as she pleased and with whatever calligraphy she pleased. If she had asked me, without hesitating an instant, I would have also let her write on my hand, on my forearm. And if I had been alone with that freckled girl of curly mane, even on my chest I would have let her write the word “sleepy”, where my heart beat out of pure desire, thinking about each of her wet kisses.

Michael, that literature professor, I wouldn’t say his job enthused him either, but it was his only source of income. He showed up to morning classes smoking his pipe and in a mild state of intoxication with some sufficiently discreet substance—gummies, perhaps? A cold beer for his whole breakfast? There was no way of knowing. Or we were projecting our crazy fantasies, which might also be the case.

Instead of boring us even more, if that were possible, by patiently instructing us in endless tropes or figures of speech—as so many other professors had done before—he took advantage of every opportunity to read out loud whichever author he felt like. Like Edgar Allan Poe’s Arthur Gordon Pym, a gripping story of shipwrecked sailors who draw straws to kill the youngest among them—and eat him.

One morning he brought with him a boombox and played us a jazz piece by Dizzy Gillespie so we would wake up once and for all. Next he told us the reason why he had brought the boombox, which was none other than to prepare us for the reading of Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, an Argentine expatriate author in 1950s Paris, whose pages are soaked with multiple references to the venerated jazz musicians of that era.

And not only jazz, but also time jumps, counterpoints, doublings, disordered chapters, or alternate reading orders. That’s why Dizzy Gillespie. And Benny Carter, Earl Hines, Lonnie Johnson, Coleman Hawkins. Good God! The f*****g book that Cortázar had written in the manner of a game for mischievous children was an encyclopedia.

Wherever professor Michael Morris is—which might be heaven—I want to thank him for that spring morning of 1983. Because he instilled in me not a sliver of love for groundbreaking novels, like Hopscotch, but a boundless passion.

It is no exaggeration to say I must have read Hopscotch fourteen times over—which is to say, endlessly—not only because Cortázar built a labyrinth, but because it poses a trial for someone with mild dyslexia—that chaste kiss the archangel Metatron gives on the forehead to certain writers who proceed by slow degrees. And the maze is not deep down a trial, all things considered, but a lovely cure.

Today, sitting at my console with a Substack feed ready to drop, I have everything I need to build an audiobook of Hopscotch myself—weaving those jazz tracks straight into the narration. It remains one of those books I have dreamed of, and never could have—a seamless score Cortázar could only imagine.

That said, today I am radiant, as usually happens to me whenever it rains. Why might that be? Let me explain. Old Bill—William Faulkner, to drop the familiarities—wrote The Sound and the Fury in 1929, to my understanding the best novel ever written using the narrative technique of stream of consciousness. For the sake of conciseness, I am not going to get into the highbrow considerations behind this statement. Faulkner demanded to publish it with several colors of ink so as not to lose the reader given its complexity. But in 1929 no one took him seriously, not even his publishers, because he was not a celebrity.

Then, in 1933, Bennett Cerf at Random House proposed a multicolor limited edition printed by the Grabhorn Press in San Francisco. Faulkner was thrilled and marked up a copy with colored pencils. However, the Great Depression hit, and the technical nightmare of running multiple letterpress passes to align single words and lines on a page made production financially impossible. Faulkner agreed to use italics as a compromise for the 1933 Modern Library edition.

It was a shrewd Victor Weybright who turned Faulkner into a bestseller by reissuing his complex and out-of-print novels with suggestive covers under the Signet Books paperback imprint of the New American Library, which sold en masse for 30 cents at newsstands and drugstores. The pulp fiction style covers, with sensationalist illustrations of a noir and markedly erotic tone—undressed women and sordid environments illustrated by James Avati—achieved an almost ironic contrast between the rarefied literature of Faulkner’s Southern Gothic and a commercial aesthetic worthy of the most torrid noir novel. Thanks to this packaging strategy, millions of American readers bought and read Faulkner for the first time. What can you do!

Old Bill did not forget his first creations. For anyone who would lend an ear, he used to recall how his long-gone publishers rudely dismissed him over the edition of The Sound and the Fury:

“I wish publishing was advanced enough to use colored ink… I’ll just have to save the idea until publishing grows up. If I could only get it printed the way it ought to be with different color types for the different times in Benjy’s section recording the flow of events for him, it would probably make it simpler. I don’t reckon, though, it will ever be printed that way, and that will have to be the best, with italics indicating the change of events.”

Well, I just found out that in 2012 an exquisite London publisher, the Folio Society, finally fulfilled Old Bill’s wishes, selling out the expensive run of copies at £175 or $345 in days.

While Faulkner initially discussed four colors for his monologues, textual analysis by scholars Noel Polk and Stephen Railton proved that Benjy’s chapter (April 7, 1928) actually jumps back and forth across 14 distinct time planes between 1898 and 1928. Because Benjy experiences time non-linearly through sensory triggers (the smell of trees, cold iron, or golf calls of “caddy”), the text shifts temporal gears mid-sentence.

I wore my eyes out tracking those time planes myself, wanting to believe that an author pulls his genius out of thin air. It stunned me when I finally understood that the trade is strictly practical. Books are made out of books. I just pry the boards loose from whatever I read last, pull out the bent nails, and use the old wood to build my own house.

There is no doubt, there will be those who think that novels have to be simple tales, that their novelty, as the word itself indicates, has to be in the surprise of what is told, not in the form itself. But these two novels prove precisely the contrary. Sometimes the novelty is the form.

I came of age believing that great literature was some kind of moral disinfectant, a high-minded shelter from my own sordid instincts. What a joke. A truly great book doesn’t sanctify you; it weaponizes you. It hands you a loaded weapon wrapped in fine typography, and I spent the rest of my days wondering why everything around me smelled like dust and empty bottles of red wine.

Without jazz and without brewing mate at all hours, you cannot fully understand Horacio Oliveira and La Maga in Hopscotch—I confess I could never handle mate myself. In turn, you also cannot read the slap in the face that is the stream of consciousness of The Sound and the Fury without the colored inks; although back in the day, I had to make do by underlining with markers, taking notes, and folding pages.

As if I had Mary Palmer by my side, who over time became a mediocre theater actress and then ended up doing TV soap operas until her time was up, I keep dreaming about these books when I should have forgotten them. The day I have money to spare, surely on eBay there will be some collector asking a fortune for the Folio Society edition of The Sound and the Fury.

But of the jazz that Hopscotch made me discover, to understand the cross-references, I will not be free unless I lose my memory completely. From time to time I have episodes of reminiscence. And I close for today with a chance run-in I had with a friend of mine, Ferdinand.

That led to a stretch of late nights at his pub where, while he was busy attending to clients, he tried to enlighten me on jazz between rounds, and I wickedly pantomimed total enlightenment—because, in reality, right under his nose during those boozy nights, I had already fucked his needy girlfriend, a philosopher who always had Adorno on those lips, a sweet peach I couldn’t resist.

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,” she said between moans, while straight into her neck I whispered Keats: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Ferdinand had closed the pub and the three of us were alone, listening to After the Rain by John Coltrane. She was as unfaithful as any given muse, while I was lost in an imaginary world, which is my true nature—thinking that La Maga had been found once again by her metaphysical lover.

The pleasure of reading lies in time travel—when I lend my imagination to the page and arrive in worlds that have vanished entirely. I am not talking about historical fiction, far from it, but about works that were, back in the day, groundbreaking and revolutionary. For surely not all my attention should be squandered on the incessant trickle of novelties, trivialities, and insubstantial drivel paraded across bookstore displays, fueling the fear of missing out. Missing out on what? Is literature ephemeral? I don’t think so.

Last week, I combed Gustave Flaubert’s walrus mustache—strictly from a personal, intimate, and evocative perspective, of course. I also made a few observations regarding his harsh, chauvinistic disposition as an unrepentant whoremonger, which was common currency in his time. Who among us hasn’t heard the term “The French Pox” used to describe those suffering from syphilis? An attentive reader shared a clever pun with me, describing Flaubert simply as “a flawed person.”

His greatest contribution to literature was his full embrace of Realism—which, as he wrote to his favorite correspondent, demanded a narrator who “must be in his work like God in creation, invisible and all-powerful; felt everywhere, but nowhere seen.” After the stylistic excesses of Romanticism, it was a welcome return to common sense.

Hence, his crowning achievement was dissecting the adultery and eventual ruin of a woman married to a country doctor in a small town in Normandy in Madame Bovary. It is not my intention today to linger on that fatalistic mammoth of a novel; nearly everyone has had occasion to read it.

An avid reader of novels—especially one willing to run the risk of writing them—derives the greatest joy from weaving them together across time, nationality, and style, uncovering unexpected connections and shared currents. An author without references beyond their immediate horizon has little to offer save for their own audacious ignorance.

Back in 1856, in Second Empire France, Gustave Flaubert scandalized his readers to such a degree that he was put on trial for offenses against public morality—a trial that provided Madame Bovary with invaluable free publicity. That very same year, the Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer ignited a widespread public debate, resonating even across America, known as Kvinnofrågan—the Woman Question. What a time, when a novel was a portal of human consciousness!

With Hertha, Fredrika Bremer does not merely portray a domestic drama; she raises a blistering indictment against the legal guardianship system that condemned unmarried women to perpetual legal minority. Under the absolute authority of a father or an appointed male guardian, a woman possessed no legal standing whatsoever. In the novel, Director Falk is no mere household tyrant; he is the very incarnation of the paternalistic state. By hijacking his daughter’s maternal inheritance to crush her spirit, he turns the home into a financial prison and obedience into a life sentence.

There is a bitter paradox at the foundation of this drama: centuries before the adoption of Roman law and state codification locked women inside the cage of legal guardianship, High Middle Ages Scandinavia granted them an autonomy unheard of in the rest of the continent. The mistress of the estate during the Viking Age, carrying the keys to the homestead at her belt, managed property, exercised the right to divorce, and held sole ownership of her wealth. The confinement of 1856 was not the inertia of an ancient tradition, but the refined craft of modern paternalism, which had reduced women to perpetual minors. Seen in this light, Fredrika Bremer’s outcry in Hertha demanded no unthinkable utopia, but the restoration of an ancient sovereignty buried by law.

One must not misjudge the weight of faith in the North. If Catholic dogmatism built an insurmountable wall against female autonomy in Southern Europe, in Protestant Sweden Lutheranism operated as a double-edged sword. The State Church preached blind obedience to the father as a divine command, yet Luther’s own theology demanded that every woman read the Scriptures for herself. Universal literacy was the fracture in the foundation. Fredrika Bremer did not need to renounce her faith to demand emancipation; it was enough to remind the King and his bishops that a soul bearing individual responsibility before God could no longer remain, under human law, the property of a guardian.

The impact was seismic. In 1858, barely two years after Hertha was published, the Swedish Parliament passed the law restoring legal majority to unmarried women. While Flaubert’s Emma Bovary was consuming her tragedy in the suffocating solitude of provincial Normandy, Bremer’s fiction was becoming the blueprint for a new civil code in the North.

The contrast between these two endings reveals the chasm separating Gustave Flaubert’s aesthetic determinism from Fredrika Bremer’s pragmatic reformism. Both heroines succumb, yes, but their deaths belong to entirely opposite moral and political orders.

Emma Bovary dies in the atrocious agony of arsenic poisoning, amidst the absolute collapse of her finances and her fantasies. Lacking analytical tools or any awareness of the civil structure suffocating her, Emma mistakes her legal and economic captivity for a mere lack of romance. Her tragedy is intimate, sterile, and private. Flaubert, in his surgical coldness, grants her neither solace nor transcendence: Emma’s death does not transform Yonville; it merely confirms the crushing victory of bourgeois mediocrity, embodied in the final decoration awarded to Homais the apothecary.

Hertha, by contrast, consumes her health in the struggle, but not in sterility. Though illness breaks her body following the devastation of the city fire, her end is not a shipwreck, but a sowing of seeds. Hertha does not daydream about shop windows or sensational lovers; she identifies the legal foundations of her oppression with anatomical precision, establishes a school for the education and autonomy of young women, and leaves behind an enduring network of collective consciousness.

Therein lies the ultimate counterpoint of 1856. Flaubert contemplates the world from a stance of impassibilité, convinced that art should not cure society, but diagnose its ugliness with unyielding beauty. Bremer, conversely, writes from the trenches of purpose-driven literature, convinced that a novel is a lever capable of shifting civil law. Emma Bovary’s agony is the destruction of a victim who does not know the name of her cage; Hertha Falk’s death is the deliberate sacrifice of someone who has just shattered her bars.

1856 was not merely a date on the timeline of the European novel; it was the crossroads where modern fiction parted ways. On one side stood the pragmatic conviction that literature can rewrite civil law and restore dignity to human consciousness; on the other, the cold certainty that art should serve only as a clinical mirror, deaf to the weeping of its own creations.

Within that tension lies the ultimate lesson of this intersection. Emma Bovary and Hertha Falk represent two possible responses to the same 19th-century suffocation. Emma is the tragic ghost of dissatisfaction, consumed by a system she cannot begin to comprehend and trapped by fantasies that finish her off. Hertha, on the other hand, is the lucid mind that names her legal executioner, converts domestic injury into a political cause, and transforms suffering into law. One leaves me with the desolate beauty of an incurable diagnosis; the other, with irrevocable proof that fiction can shatter the legal order of a nation.

In the end, this dialogue between Yonville and Stockholm leaves me with a question that continues to challenge literature today: Should a writer contemplate the cage from the icy distance of an invisible god, or do they have a duty to forge their words into a lever to tear down the bars? Flaubert bequeathed me a masterpiece of human anatomy; Bremer gave me the draft of freedom. And in the space that separates the tragic silence of Yonville from the reformed laws of the North, history proves that the word, when bound in mighty books, still possesses the power to change the world.

Yet changing a law is merely unlocking the cell door—and that is where Bremer’s crusade runs straight into the stone wall of Flaubert’s fatalism.

The enduring violence of centuries under patriarchy was never just the statutes written on a paper. It was the physical blows, the murders, the quiet omissions, and the stories spun over and over until the silence fell and obedience became total submission, until its very origins were duly forgotten. But the deeper, more insidious injury is what that untold violence did to my imagination without me ever suspecting it or asking the right questions.

When I attempt to picture true liberation, my starved mind instantly defaults to matriarchy—a simple, uninspired mirror image. I swap the actors, rename the power, and congratulate myself on a revolution, while remaining inside the exact same patriarchal cage.

I tried today to conflate Flaubert’s cold male cynicism with Bremer’s passionate female reform, convincing myself that I was choosing between tyranny and freedom. But I fail over and over; if liberation only means swapping one master for another, I haven’t escaped the trap—I’ve just redecorated it.

Bremer proved that a book can alter a statute. And if this is what I devote myself to, body and soul—if I dare to think out loud—it is because flattening the world into black and white is a failure of imagination. To erase the grays, the whole blessed chromatic scale, and the two hundred thousand shades of green my primate eyes were built to distinguish, is to settle for a delusion.

So let me drag Leibniz into the room and cut straight to the bone.

His Identity of Indiscernibles dictates that if two entities share every structural property, they are not merely identical-looking; they are literally one and the same object. Swapping the master while keeping the cage builds no new world. By Leibniz’s law, patriarchy and its matriarchal mirror share every single property of control. They are numerically identical—the exact same tyranny wearing a different title.

And as long as I remain blind to those true colors shining through that idiotic binary, Flaubert gets the last laugh from the grave: the anatomy of human bondage is absolute.

I am blessed with an inexhaustible optimism, and every moment I live feels as though it overflows with infinite meaning, provided I give it my undivided attention.

That is why I read aloud like someone eating after a long fast, savoring every bite slowly. And now, having finally learned to handle the audio console—after tweaking the knobs of the irons for four long years, and no longer recording rumble and hiss—it strikes me as quite an achievement, one that still feels as fragile as it is surreal; until now, my performances were simply winged words scattered to the wind, given their ephemeral nature. That is to say, I am now capable of recording my dreams without anyone else’s help.

Forty years ago now, as beach days drew toward the end of summer, the coarse sand of these coastal latitudes required no towels, and the suffocating heat had given way to fair weather, I used to read Gustave Flaubert aloud to a girl who had come to visit me. For a soundtrack, I had only the murmur of the waves.

Even back then, I was resolved to follow in the footsteps of the old masters, to write relentlessly for the rest of my days—which is hardly the same thing as merely stringing words together. In fact, I had already been writing poetry since 1980, though I now realize they were actually love songs.

Like the rock songs I was listening to at the time. I say this without the slightest petulance, because when I began reading true poets, I immediately realized they did not write to sound “pretty”; rather, they wrote words with weight, in the manner of sculptors carving marble, stripping away everything superfluous from the words until, from a raw block extracted from the quarries of Carrara, they brought forth the wonders of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Unless you think them—unless you make them your own—words can find themselves reduced to the murmur of the waves. That was precisely why I had chosen Flaubert’s Novembre to entertain the correspondent who had actually come to say goodbye, having found the love of her life.

Novembre is considered a work of juvenilia in the French writer’s canon, written when he was twenty and still steeped in the Romantic movement soon to be displaced by Realism. In fact, Novembre was published in 1928, nearly fifty years after his death. Like any true-to-form juvenilia, the magnificent writer Flaubert would later become is right there, devoid of the slightest artifice, pure and raw literary talent.

The plot could not be simpler: a sexual initiation tailored to the era he inhabited—that is, at the hands of a prostitute who charges him nothing for her services, swept up, perhaps, by the ardor of the young protagonist. Though this last detail, clearly, is another romantic fantasy.

Flaubert was such an inveterate whoremonger that he ended up consumed by syphilis. That walrus mustache of his mature years seen in all his portraits—he is, after all, an icon of French literature—was actually grown to conceal the teeth he lost to the mercury cure, those blue pills that wrecked his gums. But this biographical detail stirs no pity in me; if anything, pity is what one ought to feel for those poor prostitutes.

Eulalie Foucaud, fifteen years his senior, initiated the young and reckless Flaubert at the Hôtel Richelieu in Marseille in 1840 while waiting for a ship to carry her to French Guiana, where her husband, a colonial official, awaited her. Perhaps all too aware of the severe hardships awaiting her, she feasted upon the jeune écrivain, who was likewise waiting for a ship to carry him to Corsica.

Marseille in 1840 was the gateway to the Mediterranean for Frenchmen enduring the harshness of continental cold, naturally and effortlessly inviting relaxation. What is more, the lovers met at summer’s end, a time when farewells in the port city—heading toward destinations as exotic as they were sunlit—disposed one to all manner of sexual adventures.

It is said that Eulalie was smitten with the jeune écrivain and wrote him letters he didn’t even deign to answer—perhaps caught up with the prostitutes of Corsica, insufferable in his erotomaniac delusion, beyond any doubt. Furthermore, her marital peace came to an early end in French Guiana, as her husband passed away a year after arriving.

Gustave Flaubert’s romantic fantasy, for its part, transformed his rite of passage into a first-person novella under twenty thousand words. Naturally, he renamed Eulalie Foucaud simply Marie—a courtesan rather than the young mother he balled—whose backstory she narrates herself, following the classic story-within-a-story framework. Though I like to think that, in truth, the lovers surrendered to quiet confidences between acts of unbridled passion; after all, not everything is meant to be a sexual postcard.

Marie, much like the immortal Madame Bovary would be years later, fell prey to her runaway romantic imagination, to lovers who were devout only before consummating their passions, to betrayals, lies, and other unkept promises. The first-person narrator—the jeune écrivain filled with infinite melancholy in a world without a hint of beauty—seems to truly listen to her as earnestly as he loves her.

How I read Novembre to my correspondent amid the murmur of the waves remains in my memory—not because of the jeune écrivain Flaubert was, nor for the foregone farewell itself, but because of the cruel whip-crack life would gift me just a week later, with the furies of the autumn equinox. And I use the verb gift advisedly, for ever since, weightless words—words lacking gravitas, those that fail to lock together like the stones of the sunken cathedral in the depths of time, those that stir in me nothing but weariness and boredom, empty chatter—ceased to matter to me forever.

To a greater or lesser extent, all authors have Charles Dickens as a pebble in their shoe. No matter how much I want to forget his narrative mastery, he is always there, trashing any delusions of grandeur, making me feel like a complete klutz.

My childhood preferences always went to Great Expectations, and later, somewhat more grown, to Scrooge’s second chance in A Christmas Carol. But it is in this wiser age that A Tale of Two Cities astounds me, above all for the perfect musical cadence of its first page. For that very reason, a week ago, I naively thought I could rejoice in the new series Amazon made. And into a well all my joy fell.

To excuse the butchery of A Tale of Two Cities, critics offer a lazy false equivalence: Dickens took liberties with the French Revolution, so screenwriters and casting directors can take liberties with Dickens. Égalité, perhaps. But there is a vast gulf between a 19th-century novelist harnessing history to serve the story, and Amazon destroying the story to serve compliance.

This “Tale” fits what has become a predictable pattern among literary adaptations, and period pieces in general. The artificiality isn’t just about painted backdrops and CGI mobs. It’s about overly noble characters, their stagy exchanges, the manicured squalor of the poor, and, for the rich, an opulence that might have arrived courtesy of Wayfair. Again, this isn’t something specific to A Tale of Two Cities or its presenters. There seems to be a stylistic monopoly at work among the streamers of “original content” that renders innovative storytelling—and any semblance of cinema—invalid.

This afflicts nearly all historical dramas today, and I despise it. I don’t want to watch a period drama with all the characters acting like contemporary people. Part of the allure of period pieces is seeing how people at the time acted and felt, and how profoundly that differs from today.

Nor do surface details escape this contamination. A production will invest heavily in authentic townscapes and domestic architecture, only to cap the illusion by adorning the women with modern hairstyles foreign to the epoch. The visual slip is telling, but the psychological anachronism runs deeper: their sensibilities are neatly calibrated to satisfy a contemporary ideological template, entirely severed from historical reality.

By the way, I have no problem with Black actors finding employment, but the clear violation of historical accuracy is jarring. The so-called color-blind casting only goes one way. Imagine the outcry if a white actor played Martin Luther King.

It is fascinating how we have fallen headlong into such stupidity, how we are wrecking our immense cultural capital without anyone raising an eyebrow or protesting, simply for fear of being called a racist. Though this we actually deserve—we’ve even begged for it! Because I must force my memory to recall any actor playing Jesus who was a Jew, instead of an Aryan with blue eyes and a blond mane. Or an actress playing Cleopatra who was truly Egyptian and not an American beauty like Elizabeth Taylor.

George Orwell, in his essay on Dickens: “When one reacts very strongly to an individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have.”

While Orwell points to the reader’s kindness toward the author, by the will and grace of the imagination, this gives no moral ground for us to adapt however we please, in accordance with the idiot narcissism of presentism. I remember very well my efforts to reflect the historical truths of a medieval trilogy, thinking how I was going to put down in black and white the fear of being skinned alive in the woods of France by brigands during the Hundred Years’ War.

Two thousand years ago, Cicero made the function of the fiction writer quite clear in Latin: docere, delectare, et movere—to show, to entertain, and to move.

Call me a dreamer, but if I write, it is because reading Charles Dickens convinces me that one can show without plagiarizing a Wikipedia entry on a historical epoch, and naturally, without appending the clumsy wedges of overt indoctrination; entertain without collapsing into delirious fantasies, endless pursuits, and wholesale slaughter; and move an audience without indulging in the cringing, nowadays-fashionable victimhood, which poses as though we had endured the indignities of a savage African war. That is simply laying it on thick.

While Dickens shows, delights, and moves us through the horrors of the workhouse and child labor during the Industrial Revolution—as he did in David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Hard Times—he never once strains to impose a Marxist analysis, which carries a rich, dark irony, given that he was a contemporary and, from 1849 onward, practically a neighbor of Karl Marx.

Naturally, this pathetic Amazon streaming production is a visual medium. That entails constraints from which the novel is exempt, standing as a superior art form wherein the reader must supply the imagination and cannot remain passive before the page.

The novel is a timeless, intimate, and silent encounter. The novel is a mysterious kiss between two absolute strangers. No matter how utterly the author has spent himself in creation, without a reader who arrives unhurried at the proposed rendezvous, the novel does not click. It’s precisely like a kiss—you can’t do it alone.

Alas, the storyteller who uses the human voice like the curlicues of his fountain pen goes to the back of beyond. Like my mother did long ago, when she worried because I didn’t speak so much as a single word, and instead delighted my ears with amazing stories about my Castilian ancestry. Those stories about the Old Country, where I never lived except in passing, explain who I am, what I did with my fleeting life, and why I shall write dangerously until the end of my days.

Truth be told, I am not a fan of writing eulogies for people I haven’t met personally. But today, September 3rd, I will make an exception to this rule. Because it catches me in a soft spot due to my condition as a lunatic who doesn’t want a cure, nor would I want one if it were offered. I have always pampered the sources of imagination and those who awaken it; the more you let yourself be carried away by it, the more it begins to make sense. Just like life itself. And like a good book.

I will start with the departure that hurts the most, the singer Cassandra Wilson, to whom I owe a personal debt. For the times she rescued me from the edge of the abyss, so many years ago now, that I don’t consider myself the same person, even though in reality I am.

It was the last year of the previous century; I had returned from a trip to the hellhole where I lived, where I couldn’t even fit the white sofa I owned because there was no room. But as long as the desk, the books, and a mattress fit, I could keep writing passionately. By twists of fate, from having a bright apartment on the beach, I had gone to living as if I had been kidnapped in that f*****g hellhole, where at night cockroaches crawled out of the shower drain. Thank goodness it didn’t have a kitchen, only an electric coffee maker. But I couldn’t complain, as I had a window facing west, even if it was barred.

I used to write at night back then, rolling myself a cigarette laced with weed—not too much, lest I lose the necessary eloquence. I had the solitary life I always wanted. Because there is a difference between unwanted loneliness and deeply desired solitude.

This didn’t mean that from time to time I didn’t miss a redheaded girl I once knew, who had dumped me very sensibly upon realizing she was wasting her time with a textbook lunatic. The thing is, lunatics aren’t in as high demand as achievers, what can you do?

For such nocturnal trances, I used to put on some music, but always at a low volume so as not to disturb the neighbors’ rest. Cassette tapes were still in vogue, especially the ones where I recorded my favorite radio show, where a velvet-voiced announcer presented her musical discoveries.

And that was how, on one sweet solitary night, I started crying my eyes out listening to Cassandra Wilson covering Cyndi Lauper’s highly famous song Time After Time. Because that redhead, up close and properly intoxicated by alcohol, had for me the spark of Cyndi Lauper and the majesty of Kate Pierson, one of the singers of The B-52s.

The human voice is certainly intangible. But when I searched YouTube for that aforementioned Cassandra Wilson cover, I heard it much better than on that tape—not because of the obvious advance in audio technology, but because I am inordinately happy. How could I not be? I must have had a scandalous number of farewells to get to today. And yet, I now find meaning in what I left behind, so much so that I can time-travel at will without any fear.

The second eulogy goes out to Glo, a woman of boundless courage, known as Gloria Steinem. I confess I have a certain weakness for the feminists of the ‘60s, when everything was still left to be done. And when I say everything, I mean things we take for granted today, forgetting the defiance and the struggle that destroyed the lives of many activists back then, for they were true pioneers in a world full of cojones.

On top of that, she was an intrepid reporter. The night she infiltrated a party at the New York Playboy Club as a Bunny in April 1963 remains for the annals of journalism history. A Bunny’s Tale is a faithful portrait of how women were treated without the slightest respect, even by the very women who never even considered questioning the status quo. Because they mistakenly thought that deep down it benefited them to have a sugar daddy. By the way, I say this thinking about OnlyFans, which is a nightmare return to the past.

In fact, a large number of women without education or resources are tempted by OnlyFans. Because they can’t find well-paying jobs or have debts. Even college-educated women find in this odious app a way to finance their university debt.

That is why A Bunny’s Tale is as relevant today as it was 63 years ago. I know some will say I’m losing the plot for comparing a harmless app for w*****s with harsh physical reality. But the nature of the transaction, even if consensual and economically beneficial for the girl offering herself digitally, is still a step backward.

Just when it seemed women were no longer sexual objects, new ways to reverse the situation arrive. That is why feminism still has so much to do. Because the patriarchy has had the upper hand for thousands of years—exactly since we ceased to be a nomadic hunter-gatherer society.

These two goddesses who have left a massive void in me today, even though I didn’t know them personally, once served as my inspiration to try and stop being a scoundrel and a rogue, even if in reality I haven’t succeeded. Heaven knows I try.

I think masculinity is in crisis and digital natives are having a really hard time because they are incapable of handling rejection, have lost the spirit of adventure, and end up as involuntary celibates, also known as incels. The poor b******s prefer to w**k themselves to death watching rapey porn. I also think I would have liked to chat with Glo about the mess we are currently in—if not outright calling it decadence—with birth rates hitting rock bottom and baby strollers turned into doggie strollers.

Innovations in literature are born from the author’s natural drive to create. There is an audience that quickly tires of being sold the same story, told the exact same way, over and over again. This claim, however, is countered by the many authors who, once they stumble upon a fictional character that lets them churn out a series, prefer not to risk their good name in the slightest.

Look no further than the fictional detective Jules Maigret, to whom Belgian writer Georges Simenon dedicated no fewer than 75 novels and 28 short stories over four decades of cyclopean output.

Assuming risks, being willing to lose the favor of an audience that just wants more of the same—meaning the author would have to suppress their natural drive to create—is the succinct reason why modernist writers remain so fascinating. This holds true even when they openly mocked all those cowardly authors who defaulted to writing whatever happened to be trendy at the time.

For a good laugh, look at Virginia Woolf’s delightful essay Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. Or the pastiches a young Marcel Proust wrote in Le Figaro, “Filial Sentiments of a Parricide”, a psychological piece written in 1907 analyzing an acquaintance who murdered his mother, exploring guilt and maternal bonds with dark precision.

Of course, for savage mockery aimed at cheap, baby-rattle prose—neatly folded and clean as laundry in a drawer, meant for quick consumption without taxing the intellect too much, once known as commercial entertainment—nothing beats two Irishmen in Paris who took the City of Light as their adopted home.

Rivers of ink have been spilled over their work, of course, because their innovations were truly mind-bending. While one wanted to trap the entire world within a single day, the other wanted to strip time of all meaning, leaving it in an infinite loop where absolutely nothing happened.

Between these two Irishmen settled in Paris—far removed from the suffocating, idiotic nationalism that had taken over their island—a relationship formed that nearly ended in family ties during the first half of 1930. The first was at the very pinnacle of the literary ziggurat following the publication of Ulysses, thanks to Sylvia Beach, an enthusiastic bookseller who poured her soul into the work to publish it with meticulous care. The second was a 23-year-old sorcerer’s apprentice with no published work, save for two pieces in literary magazines dedicated to enthusiastically buttering up the first. I am talking about James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Let the record show I’ve avoided mentioning either author until now precisely to keep myself from buttering them up. While I always crack up reading “Circe”, the 15th chapter of Ulysses, or lose myself in Molly Bloom’s final monologue, the rest of the book is relentlessly over the top. As for Samuel Beckett, I can’t stand his later mental tailspins, nor was I ever a fan of the Theater of the Absurd. Still, his organic transition from English to French is fascinating, as is the reason he gave for it: to write “without style”—the primary motivation for so many other transnational authors. It must be because beautiful books are written in a kind of foreign language, when they strain syntax, alter rhythms, and bring an unprecedented cadence, forcing readers out of their comfort zone to project their own imagination into the gaps of the text.

Joyce was in a highly delicate spot as a writer because he had gone completely blind in his left eye and only had about ten percent vision left in his right. This was the result of a severe bout of glaucoma, iritis, and cataracts—a nightmare in that pre-antibiotic, pre-laser-surgery era. Just picturing it makes me blink out of sheer apprehension.

On top of that, alongside Nora Barnacle, he had founded the most dysfunctional family imaginable. Even so, his devotion to his daughter Lucia was boundless: possessing an artistic personality just like her father’s, she was already on the verge of being declared schizophrenic.

None of Joyce’s disciples—who bent over backward to keep the master productive, taking his dictation or bringing order to his massive piles of paperwork as they came and went from his house daily—caught Lucia’s eye quite like the athletic Beckett, a college cricket star and a prime catch.

Nora Barnacle became hell-bent on getting Beckett to date her daughter, who had received an intense, avant-garde, and eclectic education centered on modern dance. To that end, she would invite Beckett over for dinner dumplings, under the threat of banishing him from the literary paradise he had stumbled into.

Beckett knew full well that among Joyce’s distinguished disciples and patrons, he either had to cave in or head back to Dublin. So, he chose to have the dumplings. And while he was no dancer himself, he at least knew how to listen patiently to Lucia—a young woman bursting with talent in calligraphy, design, and singing, who actively collaborated with her father on the deluxe editions of his work.

Some say that the highly complex verbal associations in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake were actually inspired by Lucia. But then again, they said the exact same thing about Scott Fitzgerald and his crazy wife Zelda. While it is true that an author steals expressions and ideas like a shameless pickpocket, books are not made of ideas. They are made of words. Hence Fitzgerald writing in pencil on cigarette packs, napkins, restaurant menus, envelopes...

Once Lucia had filled Nora’s head with wild delusions of an imminent engagement, the charade reached its expected conclusion. Chairs flew, glasses shattered, and the mother of the bride decreed Beckett’s exile. What did Joyce do? Exactly what any father blinded by love for his daughter would do—no pun intended.

Beckett was pushed aside among Joyce’s disciples, who were working tirelessly to deliver installments of Finnegans Wake—then known simply as Work in Progress—in both English and French. Joyce claimed the French translation was rigid, literal. Ultimately, the monumental effort by Beckett and his friend Alfred Péron ended up eclipsed by other collaborators in La Nouvelle Revue Française in 1931.

And the schizophrenia of Lucia, the brilliant cross-eyed dancer, became intolerable to her parents and to the brutal psychiatric standards of the era the moment her sexuality came into play. They even tried Carl Gustav Jung, who diagnosed her with schizophrenia—a profound psychic regression compounded by an absolute emotional dependence on her father. Had it not been for Joyce’s steadfast opposition, Lucia would have ended up lobotomized, a horrific therapy that would swiftly fall into total discredit well into the ‘50s.

One of the greatest challenges for a reader of novels is that their way of thinking, their point of view, the scale of their interests, invariably changes. So much so that upon rereading a novel of which they have only a vague memory, it conceals hidden treasures that they will only find when they return to it again, and again, the next day, or years later.

In the previous episode of this literary podcast, I talked about the iconic American novels about daredevils. For reasons of time, I only briefly touched upon the great William Faulkner, an egregious, brilliant madman if there ever was one. At least, that was the reason I tiptoed around his novel Pylon, one of the few that escapes the fabulous Yoknapatawpha County.

Everything Faulkner wrote in the novelistic genre was experimental, ahead of its time, and sometimes even classified as dirty—sometimes because of his insistence on evoking terror, other times because he insisted on testing the limits of freedom of expression, which was rather prudish in the 1930s. And many of his ideas would have been perfectly feasible if only the publishers of his time had chipped in, like using different colored inks so that slow-witted readers wouldn’t mix up the characters.

And then there is the author himself, who, driven by debt, had been working in Hollywood as a screenwriter, rubbing shoulders with another true daredevil, Howard Hawks—not to be confused with the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes.

At that time, aviation was in its infancy, and the film director Hawks introduced Faulkner to flying the Waco biplane for nineteen months, starting in April of 1934.

When he was young, Faulkner had enlisted as a pilot in the Royal Air Force branch in Canada; the experience was cut short by the unexpected arrival of the Armistice. Although this didn’t stop him from parading around his hometown in a military uniform, cane in hand, faking a combat limp and putting on a British accent in Mississippi, which earned him the nickname “Count No ‘Count” from his mocking neighbors.

Howard Hawks, for his part, before arriving in Hollywood, had been a flight instructor in Texas and a mechanical engineer, which meant that the flying scenes being filmed needed someone who knew the ins and outs of aviation. He went on to direct six films centered on the subject.

Faulkner and Hawks shared the missed opportunity of participating in the First World War, following the values of dedication and sacrifice that today seem irrational, mostly due to its meat-grinder nature. But that was the spirit of the time. And the foundation of their friendship.

Airplane prices were not exactly affordable in the midst of the Great Depression. The red Waco, an enclosed four-seater with a 200 HP engine, cost $6,000. And Faulkner didn’t let the opportunity pass, because he was receiving a weekly check for $500 from the studios, a far cry from the peanuts he had received in royalties for the novels he had published.

Faulkner’s precarious literary reality in the early 1930s is relentlessly reflected in the numbers of his early masterpieces. The Sound and the Fury, published with a meager initial print run of just under 1,800 copies barely two weeks before the crash of 29, brought him a little over $400 in royalties due to its complete lack of initial commercial impact.

A hardship that was repeated with As I Lay Dying in 1930, whose 2,500 copies sold left him with about $600, while he scraped by working the night shift at the University of Mississippi power plant for $11 a week.

His previous glimpse of commercial success came with Sanctuary the following year, which sold over 10,000 copies and should have brought in about $3,000, but his publisher’s bankruptcy legally froze the funds and left him with only an advance of a few hundred.

An economic tragedy compounded by Light in August in 1932, whose initial print run of about 4,500 copies gave him a gross return of $1,100, an amount totally insufficient to cover the mortgage arrears on Rowan Oak and his debts at the town store.

I mention all this because of the peculiarity of the matter: that a middle-aged man would decide to revive the broken dream of his youth with the massive weekly paycheck he was receiving, having experienced Franciscan poverty up to that point, betting everything on an uncertain literary career. In fact, the first thing he did was fly over the houses of his mocking neighbors.

But Faulkner’s lucky star was about to rise. At that time, he was solely dedicated to surviving disasters with indomitable courage. Like his engine seizing before landing and doing so without facing the wind, or insisting on taking off in the terrible conditions of open fields, having to clear away cow dung first.

The hub of operations where he felt most comfortable was Memphis and New Orleans. Vernon Omlie’s school in Memphis, Mid-South Airways, was where Faulkner flew to receive advanced instruction, perform maintenance on the Waco, and take local Oxford teenagers for joyrides, inviting them to rise above the earth. But New Orleans was the long-haul destination and where he found the universe he would write about in Pylon.

The inauguration of Shushan Airport in February of 34 was not a simple aeronautical event; it was a display of Art Deco modernity that proclaimed itself the “air hub of the Americas.” Built on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, this complex was an engineering jewel of its time, being the first airport in the world to combine terminals for land and sea planes, anticipating even the great terminals of New York.

Faulkner flew there accompanied by his instructor, Vernon Omlie, finding himself immersed in a feverish atmosphere of Mardi Gras celebrations, air races, and aerobatic displays that gathered the pilots of the day. It was in this ecosystem of danger, speed, and ephemeral camaraderie that the author met a mysterious couple of aviators—he a war veteran and she an aerial acrobat or wingwalker—with whom he shared nights of alcohol, flights, and conversations that revealed to him the nihilistic and rootless psychology of the barnstormers.

That experience, captured at the exact historical moment when commercial aviation was beginning to eclipse the suicidal romanticism of traveling acrobats, became the emotional seed of Pylon, Faulkner’s only novel set in a prophetic and technological present that he himself described as a nightmare of the future.

What is remarkable about Pylon is that, alongside the red Waco biplane, it was altogether an act of procrastination in the face of a manuscript as experimental, complex, and dark as Absalom, Absalom!, which he would not finish until two years later, under contract with Random House.

As meticulous as Faulkner was when writing, in real life he was a walking disaster, and his aviation adventure ended badly. It seems he was incapable of denying the use of the airplane to his younger brother, Dean Faulkner, because they shared a passion for flying, like so many pioneers.

He financed much of his brother’s activity, which, after the accident, left him with a devastating personal guilt, feeling responsible for having provided the very means that would ultimately cost his brother his life, bringing a close to a nineteen months of happiness in the author’s life.

And because of such an outcome, Faulkner never flew again. He would take charge of his brother’s posthumous daughter and ended up finding solace in drinking and in his young Hollywood lover, Meta Carpenter. A walking cliché, he settled into a double life between Hollywood and Oxford, Mississippi.

Few adventurers, and many idiots among them, mostly adrenaline junkies trapped in alpha-male mind frames, and fewer amazons, had been jumping from cliffs using wingsuits to pilot their descent. Some of them, performing as daredevils buoyed by high altitudes and airspeed, actively hunted the proximity—veering toward the slopes instead of gliding away from them.

While it seems impossible to drive what in French is called l’appel du vide—the call of the void—at the edge of the cliff wall, try to add the adrenaline rush of hurling yourself down through a talus slope, where any imbalance of the wingsuit or split-second delay of the parachute’s opening might be fatal.

There is a genre about daredevils in literary fiction, like the barnstormers and wing-walkers in propeller-driven biplanes in Pylon by William Faulkner.

Or the crowning achievement of New Journalism in The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe, dissecting the psychology of a brave man like Chuck Yeager, whose military duty was pushing the envelope of the first jet aircraft through the sound barrier and into the stratosphere, paving the way for America’s first astronauts.

I guess I could drop in between the literary debut of James Salter with The Hunters, drawing directly on his experiences as a jet fighter pilot in the Korean War, cutting through the myth with prose as cold and lethal as the skies he actually flew in.

But comparing pilots with idiots, even if it rhymes, does not make the cut. Especially when amateurs are involved, looking for a viral picture for Instagram or helmet GoPro footage for TikTok, trying to emulate with a do-it-yourself weekend project the cold geometry of the movie star Tom Cruise jumping with a motorcycle off a Norwegian fjord—a maneuver forged through relentless rehearsals and obsessive skydives.

Add to this fatal equation a pair of minor-league television celebrities and anonymous adrenaline junkies who mix climbing cliff walls with BASE jumping, and then you get not the real stuff, but the real pulp instead—the cum shot of a bloody wingsuit. That’s a real story. Don’t you believe me? Get Netflix and watch To the Max.

Lord Byron wrote in Don Juan that “truth is always strange, stranger than fiction; if it could be told, how much would novels gain by the exchange!” With the screenwriter being a solid guy with a proven track record, I guess family constraints made it impossible to illustrate the story of a core group trapped in alpha-male mind frames until their luck ran out. So he wrote a morbid, documentary-style version of Agatha Christie’s classic And Then There Were None. And the real story tragically unfolded in the heights of selfie mass hysteria, almost mixed up with the narcissistic idiots of many genders and tribes, tripping at modest heights, but sufficient enough to break their necks. Youth is wasted on the young.

Because the script refuses to engage with the twisted psychology of the call of the void, the middle-aged men simply keep dying paying homage to the first casualty, one by one. By the third death, the film becomes a tragicomedy. As is real life indeed. Watch the raw and unvarnished reality of how quickly one of them crashes against the merlon of a Spanish castle.

I’m not taking sides either. Back in the day, I was young and reckless too. As soon as my father could no longer report a teenage runaway to the police, I served two years in the Airborne. Skydiving was wildly fun, and the propellers of the Caribou on a runway made me cry of sheer joy, anticipating the stairways to heaven of that long-winged bird before a high-altitude jump.

A few years ago, one of my brothers-in-arms was still serving and shared his experiences with me about BASE jumping. Alas, military guys never gamble and follow procedure and rules, and fortunately his name did not come up in the Wikipedia list of fatalities due to wingsuit flying. A list full of middle-aged men, except two daring amazons. Draw your own conclusions.

What I did to drive my own call of the void was trade skydiving for sailing, and as soon as you lost sight of the coastline, listening only to the music of the wind on the sails, yes, you feel the void over the invisible wreckage of sunken ships of the deep sea. That was a peaceful period full of reading, before I got the needed courage to write novels and fail big as often as necessary.

I certainly tried many times to describe with only words things like the alpha-male mind frame of that glorious skydiving time, and it’s not easy. Because the reader is always obsessed with the cum shot, and sorry for the abuse of this graphic word to describe the ghoulish fascination for death. But I never was either, until life became too precious for me after dealing with a delayed opening chute, so I couldn’t see anything but a white landscape while dealing with endogenous shock. Then John the Fearless learned at last the true nature of fear. It was a revelation to rejoice.

And whenever I try to rewrite passages of that manuscript, I have to forgive myself for being such a pain in the ass. Always whining like Jeremiah because the typewriter I used on the air base was clunky and noisy. And a cold and arrogant fish to those who were sharing the experience with me. Because I was a bookish guy, very quiet, but a natural-born killer when nightly episodes of bullying—always a coward looking for the weakest link in the chain—came close to my quarters. I couldn’t stand bullies then, and I still despise cowardice today. Seeing those idiots in present times filming with their iPhones while someone really needs help, whether it’s a woman being assaulted in the street by some aggressive male or a person getting robbed in plain sight, just boils my blood.