New aphorisms grow like mushrooms on twitter, to the humid heat of the fiery haters; or from the studied notes of the most enlightened of the place.
On the other side of this social network we find honorable digital visitors such as Arturo Perez Reverte. Perhaps at times out of place, like an overly patient Dante trying to find his way out of the circles of Hell. Hells in which, out of a fighting spirit against the demons that rule us, Pérez-Reverte ventures with warrior pride against the stupidity of so many worshipers of Satan.
They are all ugly on the inside, like Cyclops with their single eye fixed on the truth that they sell well for them, refried with the fires of evil demonic wills. But in the end, you can even get fond of them.
Because it is what it is. In this new world, each one informs himself with what ratifies his version, quenches the embers of all critical will and pulls forward into the abyss.
Perhaps that is why it is better to go back to the social networks like someone who goes out to the bar for a drink. Forgetting the bravado parish that fixes the world and focusing on books, literature, souls of a different kind, on tremulous but tangible spirits after all, as humans cultivated in their truth and in the coexistence of their opposite.
Because literature and its empathic capacity is many times that, being accountable to new evidence and arguments, rediscovering things and savoring defeats with the happiness of someone who takes a big drink as if it were for the first time.
«Talking about books on Twitter is like talking with friends at a bar counter -said Arturo Pérez-Reverte-. If talking about books is always an act of happiness, that a social network serves for this makes it especially valuable. There I naturally overturn a whole life of reading, and there I share, with the same naturalness, the reading life of my readers. And the reader is a friend. "
Arturo Pérez-Reverte turns ten on Twitter. There are many topics that he has talked about in this network in this period, but books occupy a leading place. Between February 2010 and March 2020, he has written more than 45.000 messages, many of them about literature, both his own and the one he was reading or the one that has marked him over the years as a writer.
These messages make up the virtual encounters with his followers in the mythical Lola bar and have occurred periodically since that distant day when he entered this "cave of the cyclops", as he himself called the social network.
Among the many aspects related to literature, tweeters have asked him about his next novel or his writing process, and they have asked him for reading recommendations.
This book brings together, thanks to the compiling work of Rogorn Moradan, all these direct conversations without intermediaries that Arturo Pérez-Reverte has had with his readers. Given the immediate and ephemeral nature of the comments on this network, there are some accounts that, as Rogorn says, "contain gold nuggets that are worth preserving." Arturo Pérez-Reverte's is one of them.
You can now buy the book «The Cyclops Cave», by Arturo Pérez Reverte, here: