Read Online Love in Lowercase by Francesc Miralles - Free Book Online

closed. In that case, they could dream.
    This reminded me of a passage I’d particularly liked from Pessoa’s
The Book of Disquiet
. In it, Pessoa says, more or less, that when we’re asleep we all become children again because, as we slumber, we can do no wrong and are unaware of life. By some kind of natural magic, the greatest criminal and the most callous egotist become holy during their sleep. Therefore, according to the poet, there is hardly any difference between killing a sleeping man and a child.
    From
saudade
—another untranslatable term—in Portuguese, I jumped to the words attributed to Siddhartha Gautama:
    Pain is inevitable
    but suffering is optional.
    He who doesn’t know what to attend to
    and what not to heed
    attends to the unimportant
    and ignores the essential.
    That’s me
. I got off at the Hospital Clínic stop, almost angry that someone who lived twenty-five hundred years ago should be giving me advice.
    â€”
    â€œHow are your two missions going?” Titus asked.
    â€œI’ve finished the contents page for the book. What’s the other mission?”
    â€œFinding Gabriela, of course.”
    â€œSo far I’ve drawn a blank in my search.”
    â€œI didn’t tell you to search for her, but to find her,” Titus pointed out.
    â€œI don’t see the difference.”
    â€œWhile you’re looking, your eyes can go no further than the limits of your expectations. It would be like me looking for God under the bed because, in my position, that’s the most comfortable thing. Do you understand?”
    I nodded, thinking again about the drunk man looking for his keys next to the lamppost.
    â€œSo,” Titus added, “when you’re looking, you never find anything really important.”
    â€œWhat am I supposed to do, then? Hang around with my arms crossed?”
    â€œOn the contrary,” Titus said, sitting up in his bed.
    â€œIn order to find something,” he went on, clutching my hand, “you’ve got to let yourself go. If you follow preconceived ideas, you won’t even see what’s happening in front of your nose.”
    I nodded again and noticed that the other bed was empty.
    â€œWhat happened to your roommate?” I asked. “Where’s he gone?”
    â€œIf I knew,” Titus said with a sad smile, “they’d give me the Nobel Prize for Everything.”

“The difficult I’ll do right now /
The impossible will take a little while”
    The assignment on Kafka’s
The Castle
was revealing, if only because it demonstrated that the students had not understood a thing about it.
    This has always been my favorite novel by Kafka, maybe because it’s the most enigmatic. Since he died when it was only half finished, one can only guess what would have happened in the end to the land surveyor K., who is constantly thwarted in his attempts to reach the castle.
    Was Gabriela my personal castle? Worried by this association, I brushed up on the basic plot on my way to the bar with the terrace.
    The land surveyor K. is wandering around, confused by a series of contradictory signs:
    K. arrives in a snowbound town, where he’s been summoned by the castle owners.
    Once he has found shelter at the inn, a telephone call informs him that he will never be able to go to the castle.
    Shortly afterward, he receives a letter confirming thathe has been employed in the service of the lords of the castle.
    The mayor informs K. that the castle has no need for land surveyors and an administrative error is the cause of the confusion.
    The very same day a letter tells him that the inhabitants of the castle are very satisfied with his surveying work.
    Although he receives this message, K. is still unable to do his work, and all his attempts to reach the castle fail.
    The castle is an emblem of all the most absurd human aspirations—such as the desire for immortality or my efforts to rekindle an