Home » Sport » Laura Ferrero’s Opinion Piece: Cherishing Every Moment

Laura Ferrero’s Opinion Piece: Cherishing Every Moment

I’m going to start by saying that, in the book ‘The last days of Roger Federer and other endings’, the writer Geoff Dyer rescues a revealing anecdote. He says this: “During a roundtable discussion, I once asked John Berger about his creative longevity, how he had managed to write so many books over such a long period of time. It was, he said, because he believed that each book would be the last ». I underlined it, I thought about it. Then I moved it to the first paragraph of this column where I would just like to say this: I can’t think of a better way to live or write than by clinging to that momentum, to that trend that ensures that, with good or bad results, we will do the best we know how. The song also says it, “kiss me, kiss me a lot, as if it were the last time”, because we don’t know when that last time will actually be –and I’m afraid it will never be in our hands–, but living it as if that is the case. out.

Secondly, I would like to rescue this paragraph from Rosa Montero in La loca de la casa: «I have gotten used to ordering the memories of my life with a count of boyfriends and books. (…) All humans resort to similar tricks; I know of people who count their lives by the houses they have lived in, or by the children, or by the jobs, and even by the cars. That obsession that some show to change their car every year may be nothing more than a desperate strategy to have something to remember.

To be we have to tell ourselves and to tell ourselves we must remember. I often repeat that memory is the great editor of our lives, without it we would die, because it is natural to the human being that desire to put into words, that desire to find a coherent story that, if it does not exist, will have to be invented. To build it we need milestones, posts. And in my case, cars not because I don’t drive, houses or rooms either because I would have gotten lost in the count, children either, so, like Rosa Montero, I also count the years when calculating boyfriends and books. And so, I tell myself: the year I met X, when I finished the novel, the Christmas we left him with Y. But in addition to remembering everything that was, I especially remember what was not.

The movies and songs tell it: what one would have wanted it to be is especially evoked. So, in that same order of things, I also review the novels that I would have wanted to write, that story that died trying, that stayed in the drawer, waiting for a better moment. That person I didn’t call in the end. Because we are defined by desires, attempts, regrets, but we barely count that in this desperate strategy to have something to remember.

We have all been asked that question at some point, what is the secret of a full life, of having a birthday, of growing old. There is no answer, or not just one, but I think it has to do with what John Berger is getting at. With live the milestones that Rosa Montero talks about as if they were the last, without leaving them anchored to the subjunctive of desire. Without allowing unfulfilled desires to determine us, immersed in that literary nostalgia for what could have been. One day I would like to ask Rosa Montero if boyfriends and cars should also be experienced as if they were the last. I imagine she will answer yes. Then I’ll ask him how to do it.

Laura Ferrero is a writer and author of ‘People don’t exist’

Leave a Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.