A long time ago, almost in another life, a friend of mine said to me: “you and me are alike, we belong to the race of those believing that the answer to all questions is in books.” What surprised me the most was to realize that this meant there were people who could not see things that way. It seemed so obvious to me that the answers are in books. Where else would you go looking for them?
Of course, answers can be found elsewhere, it depends on the problems. You can't learn to cook just by reading. Practice is irreplaceable. But when you already know how to cook, reading opens your horizons. Reading is not a pleasure for everyone. But if answers can be heard or seen, they can be read. To each his own preferred modality.
What my friend was actually telling me was not just that there are people who don't enjoy reading, or that there are answers elsewhere, but that there are people who don't imagine that a book can provide answers. Before her, I had never imagined that this could not be obvious to everyone. If books didn't provide answers, what good were they?
Of course, books make us dream. They tell us about worlds that no longer exist, that do not yet exist and that may never exist. Of course, books tell stories. But isn't the attraction of dreams and stories precisely that without us even realizing it, they bring that thing that allows us to live?
The World Between the Lines is for me the place to write about these worlds that we perceive, that we build, when we read, and that allow us to live. I will not only write about these worlds found in the stories we read, the one authors weave, and that we inhabit for short time punctuated by pages that turn. I will also write about this world that I inhabit and that I discover over and over again between the lines of my books, as if each page was a new pair of glasses revealing to me here and there aspects of it I had missed previously
The World Between the Lines will be an opportunity to write about the world, about books and the answers they bring.