entre ambas indefensiones

LAS ENFERMERAS

Una estela de enfermeras emprenden el regreso a casa. Protegido
por mis polaroid las observo ir y volver.
Ellas están protegidas por el crepúsculo.
Una estela de enfermeras y una estela de alacranes.
Van y vienen.
¿A las siete de la tarde? ¿A las ocho
de la tarde?
A veces alguna levanta la mano y me saluda. Luego alcanza
su coche, sin volverse, y desaparece
protegida por el crepúsculo corno yo por mis polaroid.
Entre ambas indefensiones está el jarrón de Poe.
El florero sin fondo que contiene todos los crepúsculos,
todos los lentes negros, todos
los hospitales.

Roberto Bolaño

informe sobre el misterio de las cosas

Por cierto, a Archibald sí que se le entiende claramente cuando escribe esto que sigue, precioso y acertadísimo, salvo en una cosa a mi parecer, y es que tampoco las bibliotecas se libran hoy de la soledad, tomada la Bastilla por parte de la nada de oropeles. Archibald amaba los libros y su espacio sagrado, la biblioteca, pero su amor le cegó en el diagnóstico.

When he was seventy-four years old the Cretan novelist Nikos Kazantzakis began a book. He called it Report to Greco ... Kazantzakis thought of himself as a soldier reporting to his commanding officer on a mortal mission—his life. ...

Well, there is only one Report to Greco, but no true book ... was ever anything else than a report. ... A true book is a report upon the mystery of existence ... it speaks of the world, of our life in the world. Everything we have in the books on which our libraries are founded—Euclid's figures, Leonardo's notes, Newton's explanations, Cervantes' myth, Sappho's broken songs, the vast surge of Homer—everything is a report of one kind or another and the sum of all of them together is our little knowledge of our world and of ourselves. Call a book Das Kapital or The Voyage of the Beagle or Theory of Relativity or Alice in Wonderland or Moby-Dick, it is still what Kazantzakis called his book—it is still a "report" upon the "mystery of things."

But if this is what a book is ... then a library is an extraordinary thing. ...

The existence of a library is, in itself, an assertion. ... It asserts that ... all these different and dissimilar reports, these bits and pieces of experience, manuscripts in bottles, messages from long before, from deep within, from miles beyond, belonged together and might, if understood together, spell out the meaning which the mystery implies. ...

The library, almost alone of the great monuments of civilization, stands taller now than it ever did before. The city ... decays. The nation loses its grandeur ... The university is not always certain what it is. But the library remains: a silent and enduring affirmation that the great Reports still speak, and not alone but somehow all together ...