Ricardo Lugo

Todos podemos perder noción de lo externo cuando estamos totalmente concentrados en algún refugio absoluto.

Y pienso que en la modernidad, nosotros mismos, o sea, la identidad personal pudiera ser ese refugio que nos distancia de lo externo.

La obsesión con uno mismo y este mundo mucho más, pues, narcisista, individual, identitario, nos desconecta.

Jacob Mendel me dio la sensación, él estaba leyendo, no tanto como,

Thank you very much.

ese espacio donde se encierra, ese pequeño café.

Vuelvo y repito, por eso me da miedo.

Muchos de ustedes cuando puse eso en Instagram me preguntaron, ¿pero por qué te da miedo el libro?

Porque Mendel fracasa, porque fracasó, fracasa por exceso de concentración.

Y ese tipo de fracaso se parece bastante a una vida bien llevada.

Look at how that person focuses on this, on their goal, on their goals, on what they like, on what they love.

Many of us would say that that person is correct in life or is on the right path.

And maybe it's not like that.

There are other trajectories, there are other paths and you're going to have to cross them eventually.

I remember that phrase, I don't remember who taught me, but at some point in my adolescence, someone told me, be careful with the people you step on, that you're going to get them down.

Mendel, I don't know if he trampled people necessarily, but he had to go down, eventually, and there was another world waiting for him.

So that's a point, I think, important in this book.

Second, the fragility of civilization, moving to the more political context of why Stefan Zweig writes this work.

What for him was civilization, not this intellectual coffee, the books, the conversation, the knowledge.

It's disappearing.