Sometimes it Really Happens But What if it Happens Again…


I admit it, I got close once; while reading a travelogue about the forgotten regions of the Columbian rain forest written at the end of the nineteenth century I came across an interesting sentence: “Instead of sacrificing my life to a woman, I gave my heart over to nudity and it was seized by Brutality.” This sentence had an unexpected impact on me, I was unprepared for it. You know the feeling, right? I didn’t understand why... and thanks to what? I tried reading the line over and over. My eyes floated back and forth over the words without being able to focus on the contours of the letters, to take in their black infill. Then it came to me: all the emotions evoked by the substance of the sentence abated... and I saw the mistake: during the few seconds that had just passed I’d been reading one word incorrectly over and over; rather than “nudity”, the word printed on the page was “fortuity”. Disappointed, I put the book back on the shelf. A few years later I reached for the same book again and read it. Despite its indisputable literary qualities I missed that first and unique contact with it. There’s probably no point in thinking about it more deeply; it’s sufficient to admit that this short moment in my life occurred simply, and only, because of some random error in my brain... which meant that it was unable to connect all the letters of the alphabet correctly to make the right words, and then sentences...