Patchwork 21

version español
The book's cover features snakes and spiders forming letters that make up the title, with the snakes and spiders intertwined and in motion. And what is the book? It's the book of all solutions, the one all humans have yearned for when faced with life's problems.

This is a peculiar book because, usually, its chapters arise within us before the chapters of life's problems. How strange! We're given solutions before the problems. Even stranger! When the chapters of life's problems arise, the solutions we've been given don't usually work.

But if we have it before the problems, why do we think we'd like to have it? But if we have the solutions, why don't they work? Because it's a peculiar book, like its owners. The book, written with snakes and spiders, presents us with easy and correct solutions to all the problems we can encounter in life. Almost. Easy, simple, and for any human being. More or less. When we read each page thinking about someone else's problems, it's very comforting to know how it should be solved in someone else's life: The solution is in our omniscient book. But when we read each page thinking about our own problems, we don't understand it because it's very complicated, it's very confusing and, above all, it's very boring.

Wait, reader of the previous paragraph. If the same problem is very easy to solve for another person, we pontificate about it knowing or not knowing that we won't pay the bill for the facts, why is it different in your case? Or in mine? If it's the same page, if it's the same problem! Look, the book, written with snakes and spiders, deals with the problems and fears we face with snakes and spiders in our daily lives. And here the conflict arises. For some, spiders are wonderful, fascinating beings worthy of all praise; however, snakes are evil, poisonous creatures worthy of all punishment. Of course, for others, it's just the opposite.

So when it's my turn to read the same page that was so easy to read for someone else, it's not so simple. I write what I've said and thought so many times with complete sincerity:

• Well, well, well, in his case, it's a problem about snakes and with snakes, the solution is very easy because they are, what was it, wonderful, fascinating beings worthy of all praise; however, in my problem, there are spiders and, as you know, they are evil, poisonous beings, worthy of all punishment, and these things I tell myself to calm down, relativize everything and give way to the seed of envy. Dude, the master solution to your trivial problem is in my book, but there's no solution for the problem that has lived in me for eons and, dramatic pause, will shake the universe. (I turn my head up to observe stoically how my destiny is woven in the stars).

Carrying our book of spiders and snakes, we live, we know and we suffer, distributing with our book venom both in others and in ourselves.