My most recent encounter with one of my thesis advisor, was perhaps the last to do in his office. The place was a very different picture than it was when we met in December 2005. A large cardboard boxes were proof of the impending move. My teacher is removed and the large number titles covering two side walls are going with it, or will be sold. The looks that every time they went to the nearly 400 volumes summarizing what that meant to her, and perhaps the pain of quitting. Are somehow the synthesis of a long academic career and life referents.
boxes and little signs of "to sell" must have driven our conversation about the books during the first minutes of the meeting. Another academic friend, also present, said he never gets rid of his own, for the same reason not to break or strip trash the old pictures.
And what to do, I thought, when you have to leave soon and leave behind a large personal library? When asked, I looked with sympathetic expression, but he was only referring to a possibility, or was not showing particularly dramatic.
have long regarded the book as a fellow traveler and adventure. Thus, in its traditional format, because I'm not used to read a computer screen, even if you do it daily. We know well that there are daily exercises to do every day, but we show why extraordinary satisfaction. For example, is there anything more boring than doing the dishes?
Maybe, but back to the volumes that go away, I could not avoid a return to my collection, I accumulated for many hoping to someday have a room large enough so that they fit all . However, the problem of space in Cuba is almost proportional to the size of the island into a planisphere. For some geographic reason, my country is close, although the issue of the narrowness and its relationship with Cuba always suggest more associations.
I could never have a decent rack, not a sensational and almost dying like my teacher. Almost every book I could buy second-hand bookstores in Havana or in the afternoon auction, came to occupy, after reading them, the little space that gave them some cardboard boxes stored under the bed. It was during the years that just were printed texts, so the previous editions were being recycled or acquired the status of relic and as such began to be sold.
The first and only time I attended one of those shots we make us of an old copy of The Plague of Albert Camus , by more than 40 pesos. Yet that figure in Havana in 1991 was a big budget, which covered the cost of a month in the life of a college student. Perhaps no one imagined that in the next auction would sound ridiculous amount compared to what they were willing to pay for those who were pushing religious texts.
guess my tutor has acquired their titles with fewer problems, but will not remove it difficult to pack them and decide their fate. However, I assume that too many have been a mere support for their investigative work over 30 years, ie, basic bibliography and reference.
This kind of personal library does not remind me so much to me, copies of which were either nowhere, but to a certain former employee of MINED *, who discovered in the middle of an operation in the early abandonment 90.
was checking what I was selling a semi-clandestine bookseller in Santa Clara, when I thought I heard a familiar voice. "And you buy all kinds of literature?" The seller, perhaps anticipating a lot of incunabula yes, hopefully. "Because I have a number of books of Marx, Engels and Lenin, that's what I want." When I turned, I recognized one of the members of the department of Marxism from my old Vocational School.
Today, over time, the scene seems too rushed for time. The year was 91, there could be no longer the Soviet Union, however, the speed with which some took certain decisions, it was somewhat difficult to avoid a kind of shock.
