The invention of books in the ancient world is perhaps the most significant human event in history. That is why Irene Vallejo devoted so much ink and time to the creation of the book, infinity in a reed, which is a dedication to the struggle of a human being to build his destiny hand in hand with an object as fragile as the very existence of each person. A precious object par excellence. Alexander the Great, the conqueror who returned to the Hellenic world in a global experience, slept with his copy the iliad under the pillow As a child he dreamed of being Achilles. Although his exploits far surpassed those of the mythical hero with the vulnerable heel. Who does not keep a precious object in which, they think, memory and desire for the future are encoded? Yes, in many cases these are books, those that were read to us in childhood, those that are a flash of lost time, those that are a compass.

It is possible that with her book Irene Vallejo explained the two archetypes that structured the history of the West, especially the evolution of masculinity. For thousands of years, Homer was the holy grail of their culture, their vision of the cosmos. And if the Hellenic world is currency, the iliad and Odyssey are his two faces. The Iliad is about a hero obsessed with fame and honor, who renounces a long and quiet but boring life for the sake of a glorious death, even though prophecies warn him that he will not return. He is a noble warrior, so noble that he receives the king of Troy, after killing his son, and gives him his body, because he respects the sacred human right to grieve. They cry together, absorbed in the humanity that overwhelms them. Achilles, the killing machine, sympathizes with the dignity of old Priam and remembers his father, whom he will never see again.

The Odyssey that’s something else. Irene Vallejo understands Ulisa as a modern creature, a vagabond who goes on an adventure, as Mario Santiago Papasquiaro would say, without a rudder and in delirium. You love life and its contrasts. Erotic and funny. The Monarch and the Backpacker. The writer and thinker says: “The Odyssey It is the first literary representation of nostalgia, which coexists, without too much conflict, with the spirit of navigation and adventure”. Unlike Achilles, Odysseus does not dream of a great and unique destiny. He could have been a god, but he prefers to return to Ithaca. Vallejo thinks she is a struggling and shaken being who chooses authentic sadness over artificial happiness. He embodies a new wisdom, far from the strict code of honor that moved Achilles. It was the assurance that a humble and imperfect human life is worth it. And that life, like the papyrus that comes from the reed, is valuable because it crumbles and turns into dust. It is ephemeral, like a lost philosophy or a story that everyone has already forgotten. In the end, languages ​​don’t survive either, they die like everything that ever was. Only a few books have been preserved, witnesses of learning and relief. Since the passage of a human being on the earth, the book is a glow. (OR)