The air is unsteady, fearsome and uncontrollable. It is the realm of mind, the idea of the spirit and the world of change. The winds, the clouds, the mist, all atmospheric phenomena, belong to the air. But when we breathe we know that the world is real and that we belong to it. When we take in air, and when we breathe it out, we can feel the very pace of creation. Untouchable, the air can only be felt, or lived. Infinite and invisible, it shapes mountains and creates the waves. It takes up sand and creates the landscapes of reason and madness. When you hear the wind passing through the branches of a tree, you can hear God’s voice whispering or roaring his words to you and to the universe. But anger can be found in those winds. St John said, ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth’ (John, 3:8). The air is the great sign of the spirit, but it can also be the uncontrolled life of emotions and beliefs abandoned to their own devices. The torment, the tempest or the hurricane are the wages of unconsciousness and passion. Air is linked to blood. Blood, a strange and mysterious fluid, hot and vital… Finally, the air allows communication and action, but if it is not tamed it leads to instability and agitation. This ambiguity finds its own path in the texts of this section.
Mandela’s letter opens a breach in one of the most unfair political systems of all times, namely apartheid. This letter remains a very clear declaration, a call for freedom and justice. Of course,those two words are in some contexts now out of fashion, but for the people who endured such an unbearable situation those two words were everything. Political action can sometimes touch a kind of universal nerve, and its seeds can give beautiful plants. Far away from politics, the life and fate of Remedios the Beauty in One Hundred Years of Solitude transport us to a supernatural America, where the dead smell of strong perfumes and women can fly wrapped in white sheets… The parable of Remedios the Beauty reveals the strength of the miraculous and its compelling power of attraction. Stranger yet is The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson’s masterpiece, which tells of the transformation of a scientist into something quite different. The distortion of shape and morals invented by Jekyll bears witness to the unconscious and will given free rein. Like an echo of Wilde’s experience, Dr Jekyll imagines a new behaviour, symbolically expressed by a potion. But this one is not the ‘potable gold’ of the alchemist; it is, rather, a great dissolution of the self and the summoning of unreached parts of the personality. The most impressive illustration of this ‘imagination’ can be found in the Two Minutes Hate in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where people give vent to their innermost fears in a public blast of hate. The reforming revolution turned into something disastrous and people are manipulated and slowly destroyed by Big Brother and his agents. Borges’ Library of Babel presents itself as a remarkable mirror, despite Borges’ own horror of that object. The spectacular structure of the unlikely library throws us into the labyrinth, another favourite theme in the author’s work. But the description of the library reveals an obsession with the discovery of the Book, the Book of all books… or, better, God’s Book. This ultimate journey can be viewed through the insane ‘memory’ of a great author, recalled in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, with ‘Jorge de Burgos’. And if air allows travel, it allows, too, losing oneself. And this can be a form of madness.