On a reading list (series: notes to myself)
Anna, Antigone, Emma, Juliet… did they all die in your life? And if some of them did, who died first, in your reading list? Did they die alphabetically, chronologically, in some casual order, or in a designed course? Whose death provided the semantic capital to understand the next one?
The sequence in which we read is the order in which we understand. There is only a first Odysseus, a first Faust. The next will be in their shadows. Inevitably. Necessarily.
Or so it seems. Because now that you have met Emma, Anna looks slightly more bourgeoise than before. The marbled Antigone is such a impetuous teenager, since you discovered Juliet. One day Hedda will force you to change your mind about Emma.
The same happens with places and people, occupations and distractions. Someone reminds you of someone else, and you treat them accordingly. Something looks like something else, and that’s how you look at it. The seen changes the saw as much as the seeing.
We are our reading lists, unique, like a shelf in a secondhand bookshop, incomplete until the last book.
PS The second edition of “Notes to myself” is available as a book on Amazon:
