Since childhood, for reasons I understand today, my refuge was the world of fantasy. When reading arrived in that corner, it became even more powerful and comforting. A little before adolescence, a pair of glasses came to complete the scene and, with them, the task of making sure they did not break.

So, while my classmates played during recess, I could be found in the school library, rich in religious literature, in times when I thought of becoming a saint. It did not work!

Paradox of paradoxes: my family of origin is large and, even in that crowd, I was always more inside myself, alone, than outside. I had a constant feeling of loneliness, even amid an overdose of noise, the hallmark of gatherings. Everywhere, books drew me like magnets. At my grandmother Nenê’s house, there was a treasure. My aunts read a lot, including small, romantic paperbacks that, in secret, because they were strictly forbidden, I used the holidays to devour, stocking up on interesting plots.

So I have been surrounded by books my whole life, with their characters and stories. I keep peeking at the world through words, surrounded by thousands of books. One day, a young client, a lovely boy with vibrant intelligence and a curious gaze, looked at the image of the library on the screen, turned his eyes to me and asked, a bit startled: “Did you read all these books?” I nodded, delighted by that human being’s gaze, and he asked me: “If you read all these books, when did you live?”

At that moment, in times marked by the pain of the pandemic, I smiled, a little awkwardly. I had no answer to give.

Since then, I have been building that answer. Like many people, reading was one of my defense strategies. Escaping the disarray of the present and making family in well-described plots kept me sane for many years and, in a way, still does.

Curiosity, far greater than pain, keeps driving my desire and my interest in knowing what is going on between the two covers. Or what the person who wrote it saw, thought, lived before squeezing the experience into words. It still costs me to part with a good book, and in the last pages I slow my reading to stretch the experience.

Of course, I learned a lot and also failed to learn a lot. The experience with people, from arriving to saying goodbye, as far as my memory reaches, was complex. What made me flee to books stayed with me as a companion to this day: a frightened look, skillfully hidden, and a wish to get quickly back to my corner. A protected, mediated, safe corner. Today I can already provide enough trust to that girl from the past so that she is more present with people. She now accepts my invitation to try out bonds and to trust. She flees less. She suffers less.

I recognize that frightened look wherever I am.

It is the look of people who have not experienced safe and trustworthy bonds and who developed countless strategies to stay alive in the confusion of relationships. The look of people who did not receive unconditional love, to the point of not doubting whether they belong, to the point of not knowing how to love or receive love. My role today is to welcome and support the journeys of these people.

The words I found in books helped me understand phenomena; having lived them gave me a palette of understanding and a very great wish to tell anyone who will listen that it is time. It is always time. To live outside refuges.

This week, for the first time, I found in two words a point of reflection about survival strategy: “oceanic feeling.” Enchanted by words as I am, even without knowing what they meant, I savored the two, and for days they wandered around the condominium of my mind.

Driven by curiosity, I went looking. In a letter to Sigmund Freud in 1927 (almost a hundred years ago), Romain Rolland used the expression to describe the sensation of eternity and of being one with the outside world. I imagine the two thought hard; I can see them at a café table, agreeing and disagreeing, between puffs of cigar here and there. My wish is to travel in time to ask questions.

Given what I live and witness, the human attempts to survive in the crowd, I tend to align with what Sigmund finally concluded: the oceanic feeling, a unity with the world, describes the sensation a child has before learning that there are other people in the world.

Ah! So that is it! A search to recover that instant when there was not yet the threat of not belonging, because there was no doubt.

Since encountering the “oceanic feeling,” I have thought about the possibilities of consciously recovering that feeling as a goal, and not as an escape. It seems to me I need to be very present in the present, with my agonies contained and my inner child at peace...

It was a delight to discover, among the many moments when this oceanic feeling occurred. I curated those moments. A delight. Children, loves, friends, music, images, skies, aromas, flavors, sensations... Two words that can open the way to flee or to seek.

For those who want to read about it: Freud ends The Future of an Illusion with a discussion of the concept and returns to it at the start of Civilization and Its Discontents, answering Rolland’s request. There, he credits the concept to an anonymous friend, mentioning Romain Rolland in a footnote, as it appears in the Spanish version published by Amorrortu in 1994.