a-ver-outras-coisas: Ler pode tornar-nos mais felizes?

Sem tempo para poetar, deixo o espírito vaguear e dou de caras com um artigo da "The New Yorker" de 9 deste mês. Biblioterapia? Isso existe, pensei para comigo, assim a modos que distraída. Tive que ir aprofundar. Pois, ao que parece, o termo aparece em 1916 e surge depois como conceito clínico em 1943 pela pesquisadora americana Caroline Shrodes. Na prática, é um termo bastante lato para a prática de encorajar pessoas a ler para efeitos terapêuticos. * 

Adiante, que deixo apenas pistas. O importante é o belíssimo artigo que li na revista, assinado pela antropóloga e escritora Ceridwen Dovey - que se questiona: Ler pode tornar-nos mais felizes? Segue-se um spoiler: a pergunta fica sem uma resposta concreta, preto no branco. Porque dela não precisa. 

Deixo-vos os primeiros parágrafos [no original inglês, é verdade; um dia que esteja cheia de tempo venho aqui e traduzo, prometo] e a ligação para lerem o resto, que é um pouco mais longo do que o tempo que dispomos para um café mas que se dispende calmamente ao final do dia, antes de pensar em ir dormir. Não vão dar o vosso tempo por mal empregue, acreditem.

Curiosidade: o livro "O Evangelho Segundo Jesus Cristo", de Saramago, é mencionado.

Ana Almeida

"Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.” I’ve generally preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf’s passionate commitment to serendipity in my personal reading discoveries, delighting not only in the books themselves but in the randomly meaningful nature of how I came upon them (on the bus after a breakup, in a backpackers’ hostel in Damascus, or in the dark library stacks at graduate school, while browsing instead of studying). I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people—or different things to the same person—at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.

But the session was a gift, and I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the initial questionnaire about my reading habits that the bibliotherapist, Ella Berthoud, sent me. Nobody had ever asked me these questions before, even though reading fiction is and always has been essential to my life. I love to gorge on books over long breaks—I’ll pack more books than clothes, I told Berthoud. I confided my dirty little secret, which is that I don’t like buying or owning books, and always prefer to get them from the library (which, as I am a writer, does not bring me very good book-sales karma). In response to the question “What is preoccupying you at the moment?,” I was surprised by what I wanted to confess: I am worried about having no spiritual resources to shore myself up against the inevitable future grief of losing somebody I love, I wrote. I’m not religious, and I don’t particularly want to be, but I’d like to read more about other people’s reflections on coming to some sort of early, weird form of faith in a “higher being” as an emotional survival tactic. Simply answering the questions made me feel better, lighter.

Ilustração de Sarah Mazzetti para a "The New Yorker"

We had some satisfying back-and-forths over e-mail, with Berthoud digging deeper, asking about my family’s history and my fear of grief, and when she sent the final reading prescription it was filled with gems, none of which I’d previously read. Among the recommendations was “The Guide,” by R. K. Narayan. Berthoud wrote that it was “a lovely story about a man who starts his working life as a tourist guide at a train station in Malgudi, India, but then goes through many other occupations before finding his unexpected destiny as a spiritual guide.” She had picked it because she hoped it might leave me feeling “strangely enlightened.” Another was “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” by José Saramago: “Saramago doesn’t reveal his own spiritual stance here but portrays a vivid and compelling version of the story we know so well.” “Henderson the Rain King,” by Saul Bellow, and “Siddhartha,” by Hermann Hesse, were among other prescribed works of fiction, and she included some nonfiction, too, such as “The Case for God,” by Karen Armstrong, and “Sum,” by the neuroscientist David Eagleman, a “short and wonderful book about possible afterlives.”

Leiam o resto do artigo aqui.
Saibam mais sobre biblioterapia aqui.