These days the 36th edition of the Turin Book Fair is being held, one of the most important cultural events in Italy dedicated to books and reading. To celebrate it, let’s start this new day with a phrase of rare beauty belonging to Walter Benjamin which sees books as protagonists, trusted life and travel companions, endowed with an almost miraculous power.
“We collect books thinking we can take care of them, but they take care of us.”
The power of books
To heal from illnesses of the soul, sometimes you just need to open a book and dive into it headlong. Once immersed, time will slowly begin to evaporate, finally dissolving into a light fog, capable of isolating us from the outside world. There is nothing, like a book, capable of stopping time and expanding our life, or rather suspending it in a dimension of pure imagination.
Books, like love, have in this sense an extraordinary healing power, allowing us to travel through time, to suspend or dilate it. Therefore, today, tomorrow and always, let’s open the books and rely on their power to travel through time, but also to break barriers, to tear apart the veil that prevents us from being happy, to know ourselves and the world.
We take care of our bookcases: we sort the books based on size, color, type or author. In this way we take care of them, but we don’t realize how much they actually take care of us.
Exalting the salvific value of books also means enhancing their content, i.e. the words. Reading the right sentence, the story that may have a particular meaning for us at that moment, can improve our state of mind, help us reflect or look at things from another point of view: it can indeed be saving. This is how books take care of us, allowing us to read them, leaf through page after page, at least keep us company and, in the best case scenario, improve our state of mind in the most delicate moments we can experience.
Let’s open books to live: this is the not at all banal and obvious message that Walter Benjamin wanted to convey to us with these words of his.
The Turin Book Fair 2024
“Imaginary life” is the theme of the XXXVI edition of the Turin Book Fair, the event which this year is held in the pavilions of the Lingotto Fiere from Thursday 9th to Monday 13th May, under the new direction of Annalena Benini.
This year’s Turin Book Fair aims to be a tribute to imaginary life in all its forms, to its creative and ever new way of creating other worlds and making them meet. As Natalia Ginzburg said, “imaginary life moves creative life and sometimes anticipates real life”.
The illustration was created by Sara Colaone, illustrator, comics author and teacher of Comics and Illustration at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin was one of the greatest intellectuals of the 20th century. He studied in Berlin, Freiburg and Munich, graduating in philosophy in Bern (1919). He then approached the Marxism of G. Lukács and became friends with M. Horkheimer and Adorno with whom he collaborated in Frankfurt and, after the advent of Nazism, in Paris. Following the defeat of France, he tried to escape to the United States, but on the Spanish border, to avoid falling into the hands of the Gestapo, he killed himself.
His works of philosophy and literary criticism are considered masterpieces of twentieth-century thought. Among those translated into Italian we remember Angelus Novus (Einaudi, 1962), The work of art at the time of its technical reproducibility (Einaudi, 1966), The German baroque drama (Einaudi, 1971), Berlin childhood around the nineteenth century (Einaudi, 2001).
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