Arantza Areilza – The need for literature

Arantza de Areilza – IE Dean of Humanities.

Reading:

The need for literature by Emilio Lledó, 2002.

…Literature isn’t just the beginning and the origin of intellectual freedom, it’s also a universe of free ideality, a territory of infinite possibility. Books are doors that nobody can close on us, despite censorship. There is only one kind of censorship that is genuinely dangerous: the kind we impose on ourselves because, in this clumsy and grubby society we have lost the passion for understanding, the pleasure of knowledge.

All real freedom, all pleasure in living and feeling, begins in our mind. And that mind, the ideal part of our body in the prodigious network of neurons, also needs feeding and sustenance. Words are the substance that intelligence feeds off. And these words are already embedded in the original syntax of literature. A world made into language, argued and built from an infinite space where it is possible to say and feel everything is possible. Furthermore, a world that in its solitude, in its marvelous innocence and freedom, nobody any longer manipulates, nobody any longer twists, nobody can falsify or alter…