References

One of those books that can live on the bedside table is the Comedy, because it belongs to that class of books you can open at any page and start reading at random with no doubt about the transformative experience that awaits. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) may be considered one of the founding edifices of Western literature, because it connects with Virgil and the rest of the Graeco-Latin tradition — Virgil himself accompanies Dante on his journey through those concentric labyrinths — and because it is filled with assertions about life and our human condition, seen from a European vantage point, along a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. But Dante is not limited to that: in the Vita nuova (“New Life”), written in his youth and combining poetry and prose, he turns his love for Beatrice Portinari into an exploration of the experience of love, of memory and of identity itself. In Un laberinto propio, Dante appears precisely through the Vita nuova and an adolescent discovery. A teacher writes on the blackboard lines such as “A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core” and tells his pupils the story of the young Dante and his fascination with Beatrice. For one of them, who has just fallen in love with an Italian girl over a summer in England, a medieval work suddenly becomes something personal and contemporary. The episode serves to raise one of the book’s central ideas about education and the fostering of reading: literature acquires extraordinary force when the reader discovers that it also speaks of their own life. Literary complexity need not be a barrier if there is a meaningful connection with the person reading. That is why Un laberinto propio proposes a simple question for approaching even the most demanding classics: “How much of Dante is there in me?”. The author’s formation as a reader comes across as a way of reading clearly shaped by the vision of what an exodus is: to read is to set out on a journey of inner transformation in which every page leads to a deeper understanding of oneself, of other people and of the world. Luis González himself writes as early as the preface: “This journey may look more like a fluke than a plan, but it was really conceived as a billiards strategy. One play, for instance, may begin with a first ball set rolling by an almost innocent gesture: the memory of a teenage infatuation with an Italian girl during a holiday in England. That ball runs on and grazes another — the one in which that boy suddenly identifies with Dante Alighieri when, back home, a teacher presented a sonnet from the Vita nuova in class. That ball in turn drives a third: the Ljubljana Manifesto in defence of ambitious reading, and the conversation with its author about the first books we read in our lives”.

Anglophilia appears in Un laberinto propio less as an abstract admiration for Great Britain than as an example of how our readings build our cultural identity. The author contrasts two experiences: his daughter, raised in a cosmopolitan environment, has no need to feel Anglophile because London is naturally part of her world; for him, by contrast, Britishness was a territory he had to discover and conquer through books, travel, music and family references. The origin lies in childhood: the Just William books, the pudding his grandmother learned from an English friend and, above all, a family library in which Dickens and other British authors were present. There is even an earlier Anglophile tradition, linked to his great-grandfather and to the divisions between the Anglophiles and the Germanophiles of the following generation during the First World War. But it is reading that turns that inherited inclination into a true labyrinth of connections. Dickens leads to Scott, Conan Doyle, Stevenson and Defoe; later come Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, Eliot, Blake, Wordsworth and Lawrence Durrell. One book leads to another, and those books lead to places, music and experiences: from the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall to the search for the Alexandria imagined by Durrell. With such a background it is hardly surprising to find the following sentence in this book: “Brexit was a small tragedy for me and a great catastrophe for Europeans — obviously including the British first of all”. Anglophilia thus serves to formulate one more of the book’s central ideas: we are also the itineraries we have travelled as readers. And those itineraries never stand still. Over the years the authors change, the preferences change, and so does our interpretation of the same works. A cultural affinity could be seen as a prolonged conversation with a tradition: some writers drop out along the way, others return, and a few become companions for life.

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) was an American writer, biochemist and populariser of science, considered one of the most influential figures in science fiction thanks to his cycles around the Foundation, in which he drew on the history of Rome to build a vast narrative about a galactic empire. He began writing the first of the novels before the Second World War had ended, and in creating that world he addresses themes such as artificial intelligence — a central concern — the role of knowledge in the organisation of societies, long-term planning, the capacity to predict the future and the effects of decentralising power. Un laberinto propio devotes two paragraphs to how reading Asimov’s novels may have shaped the high value the author places on foresight and planning in his own professional work: “I think it is reasonable to say that the readings of childhood and youth help to configure the way we think. They determine certain intellectual reflexes, mould the way we reason and even the perception we have of reality. In my experience, a set of novels about the fate of a galactic empire can end up inspiring quite specific professional behaviours, sustained over the course of a career”.

Jane Austen’s novels are proof that literature can cast light — like a lantern in a cave — on the limitations, aspirations and forms of resistance of the women of her time. Austen (1775–1817) holds a central place in the history of the novel for her extraordinary ability to explore the complexity of human conduct through everyday settings. Her works examine family relationships, marriage, education, social position and individual expectations with a unique combination of irony, intelligence and psychological precision. The author of Un laberinto propio insists on how fundamental certain books have been in completing his perception of what it means to be a woman; over the course of his life he has been shaped by the women of his family circle and by others he has known beyond it, and his admiration for this half of humanity has grown greater still through the voices of authors such as Austen.

José Martínez Ruiz, Azorín (1873–1967), was a novelist, essayist, columnist and critic who turned the observation of the apparently insignificant — a landscape, a street, an everyday object, the passing of time, a kiss at the door of Segovia Cathedral — into literary material of the highest order. His writing is marked by clarity, precision and an extraordinary attention to detail, in a prose that strips back rhetorical devices to intensify the gaze, yet always with enormous elegance. In Un laberinto propio, Azorín appears only fleetingly, but behind that mention lies a much longer reading relationship. The author keeps numerous old editions of his works and attaches special meaning to the first edition of Doña Inés, both for literary reasons and for the family and biographical connections that name evokes. Azorín thus also stands for one of the book’s recurring ideas: a personal library is not merely a collection of texts but a repository of memories, associations and lived experience. Andrés Trapiello — a fundamental reference for a reader like Luis González — acknowledges this author of the Generation of ’98 as one of the writers he admires, and has gone so far as to say something like: “the great writer to set out from is Baroja, and the one to arrive at is Azorín”. The formula is especially suggestive for Un laberinto propio, because reading over a whole lifetime also means returning to certain authors and discovering that each time they can be something different and richer, which the passing of time allows us to appreciate.

“I have quoted Naomi’s studies and books on many occasions in my lectures, because she is a world authority in the field of reading”, the author notes in this book. For those who work in the field of reading Naomi Baron is an essential author, and lately she has focused her research on the impact of the digital on the activity of reading. Un laberinto propio records a conversation over wine between the author and this American researcher. Baron holds that outcomes will depend on how the activity of reading is undertaken — with concentration or in a scattered way — more than on whether it happens in print or on screen, and she tells González: “As I argued in How We Read Now, what matters is the reader’s mindset. When bots read for us, their texts are digital, but their brains are not altered — because they have none. If we humans delegate our reading to bots, we should worry about the imminent accumulation of information without comprehension”. A few months ago Stanford University published her most recent book, which addresses precisely this matter: Reader Bot. What Happens When AI Reads and Why It Matters. The book carries a recommendation from Maryanne Wolf on its band.

It comes as no surprise that Antonio Basanta (b. 1953) occupies an especially close place in Un laberinto propio, because he is someone who has devoted a good part of his professional life to reading. Not only was he a teacher and the head of a large publishing group; he is also a key figure in the design, growth and consolidation of the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez, the institution now directed by the author of this book. Basanta has devoted much effort to reflecting on how readers are formed and how reading can be fostered socially. In his book Leer contra la nada (“Reading against nothingness”, Siruela, 2017) he condenses an idea that Un laberinto propio takes up: reading does not necessarily mean isolating oneself, but rather starting a conversation. Basanta finds an especially clear demonstration of this in reading clubs: when several people share what they have read, individual interpretations meet and understanding widens. The diversity of viewpoints makes it possible to discover in the same text meanings that a solitary reader might not have perceived. This conception links with another of the book’s concerns: understanding better what happens when we read. Basanta also helped the foundation to take on the relationship between neuroscience and reading, which is now the subject of the book Un regalo de los dioses. Neurociencia de la lectura (“A gift from the gods. The neuroscience of reading”), which he has written with Nazareth Castellanos. His presence in Un laberinto propio also has a professional and personal dimension. Basanta took part for decades in projects related to book and reading policies, and it was he who proposed that the author join the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez to succeed him as its director.

Beethoven (1770–1827) is present in a good many passages of the book — he appears almost twenty times — because he seems to have been a composer of great importance in the author’s life. He is the musician who serves as the best metaphor for the act of reading: every conductor, pianist or quartet performs a different reading of the same score, just as every reader builds an unrepeatable version of a text. Indeed, in the final chapter of Un laberinto propio the author gives him a fundamental role: “Ever since I was a teenager I have thought that my namesake Beethoven had access to another dimension, one that seems not physical but transcendental. There is a radical difference between musical writing — which specifies pitches and durations — and verbal writing, whose graphemes form words with meaning”.

Although Un laberinto propio quotes this author only once, his works have had a notable influence on González’s intellectual evolution. At the point where the book dwells on reading as a tool for innovation and freedom, it expressly recalls Isaiah Berlin’s (1909–1997) warning about a conception of liberty, grounded in Plato’s scheme, that identifies being free with acting rationally, according to a kind of ideal rationality — the danger arising when we accept that others, supposedly more rational, know better than we do what is good for us, and thereby acquire the legitimacy to direct our decisions in the name of our “true” freedom. In the context of Berlin’s and Popper’s ideas the author remarks: “My suggestion, after reading so forceful a text, is to tie this whole vision to the meaning I give to reading as the true key to innovation, because in an open society political power is subject to control and revision, and people are free to voice their opinions and change their leaders through peaceful, democratic processes — without being scorned for failing to share the reason of the gods”.

In Un laberinto propio the library is conceived as a cultural and civic infrastructure capable of transforming people’s lives. The médiathèque of Saintes serves as the example of an idea of the library that outgrows the traditional image of a silent space devoted exclusively to keeping books, reading and study. There, encounters, workshops and reading clubs can happen — and above all that serendipity by which a book found unexpectedly opens a path we did not know existed. The French experience of the médiathèques, and the projects run by the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez in Ibero-America, lead to a further conviction: the true strength of a library lies not in the building but in the people who make it work. The book cites the example of innovative librarians who can turn a library into a bank of knowledge, a support for entrepreneurs, a garden of learning, or a space in which to fight loneliness and ease the integration of those arriving from other countries. This community dimension does not displace the book or the individual experience of reading, because all those relationships happen around reading and knowledge. The library thus represents, on a small scale, another of the fundamental theses of Un laberinto propio: to read is not to withdraw from the world but to acquire tools for taking part in it better. That is why libraries are also strategic assets of a society: they strengthen analytical thinking, creativity, the transmission of knowledge and the bonds that allow more open, prosperous and democratic communities to be built.

Borges (1899–1986) holds an especially important place in Un laberinto propio because his literature embodies several of the ideas the book gathers: the labyrinth, play, the connections between texts and the reader’s creative participation. His presence opens, moreover, with an amusing anecdote — another frequent ingredient of this book — that brings together Joy Division, Borges himself, El Retiro park and an episode with María Kodama decades later. The book also recounts an episode that illustrates the importance of teachers in the making of readers. When the author was fourteen, a teacher dictated in class the opening of The Circular Ruins and stopped reading at a decisive moment: anyone who wanted to know the ending would have to look for Ficciones in the library — and that turned Borges into a reading companion for the rest of the author’s life. The Circular Ruins also provides a gateway into the Borgesian universe, and a way into the theses of Un laberinto propio: the game between the dreamer and the being who is dreamed blurs the borders between reality and fiction, just as Borges keeps his books in constant dialogue with one another. Cervantes, Through the Looking-Glass, Berkeley and The Golem form part of a web of references that the reader must travel and reconstruct. Borges wrote, without doubt, a literature that demands participation, and in his case it is evident that reading means making connections, interpreting, and creating something that was not entirely contained in the text before our arrival. His gardens of forking paths offer, for that reason, a particularly fitting image for Un laberinto propio.

Claude Boucher (1842–1913) appears in Un laberinto propio because his story makes it possible to connect technology, territory and economic complexity. The growth of the cognac trade drove bottled shipments during the nineteenth century and, with them, complementary activities such as the manufacture of glass, boxes, corks and printed matter. Settled in Cognac from 1878, Boucher devoted years to inventing a machine for making bottles, a process which was still artisanal and depended on lung-blown glass. In 1898 he developed his semi-automatic machine, which replaced that effort with compressed air. The innovation did not merely raise the productivity and regularity of the bottles considerably: it reduced some of the grave occupational risks endured by glass-blowers. The case of this ancestor of Luis González’s cousins thus serves a broader reflection in the book: innovation does not arise in isolation, but where different kinds of knowledge, needs, industries and people can connect. In the Musée des savoir-faire du cognac one can still see a machine of this first bottle-making model; it looks like a kind of mechanical insect, an object that still preserves the anatomy of the artisan. In the same museum there is a small library of fiction in which the world of cognac has a strong presence and where visitors can find Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea, which gave Luis González a “metaphor for the meaning of that relentless human tendency to improve our technologies, and of the risk it carries, when speaking of trades such as those of the blacksmiths or the glassmakers, who shaped that white-hot matter without rest — men who faced fire and danger — drawing a comparison between the fragility of the human body and the force of nature, of the sea”.

Un laberinto propio quotes a passage from Hugh Macdonald’s book Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year, recounting the journey Brahms made on foot along the banks of the Rhine, as another example of the connection between walking and introspection: “For the Germans of his time that walk represented a connection with their oldest myths and, above all, an inner pilgrimage on which Brahms was to meet himself — something that would remain reflected for ever in his musical creativity”. Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) is another composer with a strong presence in González’s book, because he was present in his childhood and across several generations of his father’s family, and because his is a case that shows how many artistic creations are born of dialogue with those who preceded the composer — or the writer of a book — just as every reading carries the memory of other readings, generating a reading biography that is unique and personal. These digressions, moreover, connect beautifully with the references to Beethoven and Schubert, with the walks described by Robert Macfarlane in The Old Ways, and with the European conception of the cultural journey that runs through the whole essay.

Charlotte Brontë (1816–1855) won international recognition with Jane Eyre, a novel that combines personal formation, a measure of social criticism and intense psychological exploration. In Un laberinto propio there is a clear acknowledgement of how important a whole series of epiphanies has been for its author — epiphanies that came from reading works written by women, and from listening to the ideas some women have shared with him about their reading. In the case of this British novelist, he recognises that her work turned the exploration of the inner world — the psychological novel — into one of the great subjects of modern literature, placing identity and personal freedom at the centre of narrative experience. The intellectual and moral autonomy of her female characters influenced English fiction for many decades afterwards. For the author, reading experiences of this kind provide an energy capable of resisting the limitations imposed by one’s surroundings: reading is a ground on which to strengthen our freedom. Her work could be connected back to Jane Austen, forward to the transformation wrought by Virginia Woolf’s novels in the literary weight given to consciousness, and across to Elizabeth Jane Howard in the depiction of inner life.

Bronwyn is the female character in The War Lord (1965), the film starring Charlton Heston that left a deep childhood impression on the author of Un laberinto propio. In the story, the feudal lord Chrysagon is drawn to the young woman and exercises over her a seigneurial prerogative that turns power into dominion over another person’s body and will. The figure of Bronwyn would also inspire Juan Eduardo Cirlot, who made her the centre of an intense cycle of poems bound up with desire, imagination and destiny. In Un laberinto propio, that old cinematic image resurfaces unexpectedly in González’s mind during a trip to Cuba. The account of a father threatened by a local representative of communist power (the CDR) triggers the connection with the Bronwyn scene. The association also reveals a current running through the book: the defence of human dignity, individual freedom and equal rights against any form of arbitrariness. Bronwyn thus stands for something we can learn from reading, from cinema or from our own experience: that one must always stay alert and fight for individual freedom and equal rights, whatever the arguments put forward for imposing something on us for “our own good”.

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) was the writer who set the author of Un laberinto propio searching for grown-up literature, and he says of him: “He is an essential figure for helping the young cross over into demanding literature because, far from representing a halfway point between the accessible and the profound, his combination of realism and fantasy, of irony and transcendence, achieves a literature at once penetrating and light. Calvino has become one of those companions one keeps at one’s side for a whole lifetime”. Calvino is an Italian writer who blends imagination, intellectual rigour and a constant mastery of the possibilities of language, in an Italian so rich and demanding that it forces a Spaniard reading in that language to reach for the dictionary.

Charkin (b. 1949) is one of the great international figures of the book world, having held senior positions in some of the largest publishing groups, led the transformation of business models and launched publishing phenomena such as the Harry Potter books — and he remains a pioneer in applying strategies based on common sense. In 2024 he published My Back Pages: An Undeniably Personal History of Publishing; the Spanish publisher Trama brought the book out under the title Publisher, and it was presented at the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez centre in Madrid (Casa del Lector). Un laberinto propio recounts several episodes, not without humour, starring its author and Richard Charkin: from their meetings at the Chelsea Arts Club in London to a walk through Segovia’s medieval labyrinth, before a final carom in the closing chapter, after yet another shared lunch. When Luis González begins to structure and write Un laberinto propio, during his holidays in France in the summer of 2025, he discusses the project with Charkin — who also happens to be holidaying in France. Charkin offers his first impressions and shares with him the experience of having written his own book about the publishing world.

The French historian Roger Chartier (b. 1945) gave a week-long masterclass in May 2014 at Casa del Lector (Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez). He is a leading authority on the history of the book and of reading. He is quoted in Un laberinto propio in the recollection of an informal conversation between Naomi Baron and González at a forum called Lecturalab. The author refers to the first treatise in the vernacular on the art of printing, written in Madrid in 1680 by Alonso Víctor de Paredes, which he came to know thanks to Chartier’s book Escuchar a los muertos con los ojos (“Listening to the dead with our eyes”): “In it, the author distinguishes between the content — which he equates with the soul — and the printed form, which he compares to a graceful, gallant body. Kant, likewise, writes that there are two ideas of the book: the book understood as an ‘opus mechanicum’, that is, a physical object, and, on the other hand, the book as discourse or content”. These references belong to a passage devoted to the impact of digitisation in dissociating content from its medium.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was a Roman philosopher, orator, jurist and writer. In a recent conversation the author remarked: “I now feel much closer to his thought than when I was a boy spellbound by my teacher — a.k.a. ‘El Lacio’ — reading the Catilinarians in Latin. There is much talk of ‘critical thinking’, and I have come to the conclusion that it goes on without a proper grasp of what the term means — indeed, the term is even used in a sense completely at odds with the role it is given: to disparage others and ostracise them. Implicit in this labyrinth in the form of a book is a vision of his work as one of the pillars of our Western thought. There is also an assimilation of the passage into maturity and old age, because I now perceive that in my youth I admired Julius Caesar, while Cicero seemed to me brilliant but part of an ‘establishment’ — a member of the ‘equites’ who reminded me of a tradition of my own family circle, built up by many generations of the educated middle class. Today, by contrast, profiles like Julius Caesar’s terrify me”. In his letters, speeches, philosophical treatises and works on rhetoric there is an expository clarity, a literary elegance and an ethical reflection that can be fascinating if you manage to enter his work fully. There is one principle, one conviction, that you will also find in Un laberinto propio: that the word well used could serve the common good, and that an education integrating knowledge, virtue and participation in public life is a step towards a better society. Through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, his writings held a central place in the formation of generations of readers, humanists and rulers. His legacy shows that reading does not merely convey information: it cultivates the capacity to reason, argue and converse with intelligence and responsibility.

Ewan Clayton is a British calligrapher, historian of writing and essayist who specialises in the evolution of written culture. For anyone who combines a love of the world of books with a taste for — or at least a tolerance of — erudite approaches, his work is a source of pleasure. He shows most effectively how the history of letterforms and of material supports has decisively shaped the way people read, write and transmit knowledge. Reading his work helped Luis González to understand a great many things and to seek out new, specialised sources on typography, such as Eric Gill’s book, McLean’s The Thames and Hudson Manual of Typography and, of course, that jewel by Stanley Morison.

In Un laberinto propio, complexity appears as a characteristic of societies capable of innovating, prospering and generating knowledge. The arrival of the printing press in Segovia makes it visible: Juan Parix of Heidelberg settled in a city with an industrial tradition, textile activity, technical knowledge, trade and specialised workers. There existed, in other words, an ecosystem in which different capabilities could combine to take up a new technology. This observation links the reader of this book to the concept of “economic complexity”: societies that possess a greater diversity of knowledge, professions and productive activities also enjoy more possibilities of relating them in innovative ways. Wealth does not depend solely on accumulating resources but on multiplying the connections between people who know how to do different things. Specialisation — ever since Adam Smith’s division of labour — increases collective capacity precisely because it makes interaction necessary. The reference to the context of the Segovia of those years brings in a further element: a certain social complexity, embodied in the presence of merchants, manufacturers, nobles, artisans, conversos and other groups who shared a society relatively open for its time. Such plurality favoured the circulation of knowledge and innovation, and this connects with the conception of reading defended in Un laberinto propio and with the model developed by César Hidalgo and Ricardo Hausmann in The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity. For both authors, the productive capacity of an economy depends on the set of knowledge and capabilities a society possesses and, above all, on the possibilities of combining them. That is why the most complex economies can produce goods that require many distinct capabilities that are hard to bring together. This perspective helps to understand the example of Juan Parix’s Segovia, and allows whoever reads this book to generate new ideas around one thesis: the printing press could take root because it found an ecosystem that had already accumulated technical, commercial and artisanal knowledge ready to connect with the new technology. And it allows the analogy to be extended towards one of the theses of Un laberinto propio: a reader’s mind, too, gains complexity when it takes in diverse knowledge that it can later relate in new ways. The more pieces our intellectual repertoire contains, the greater the possible — and, happily, improbable — combinations.

Reading Hopscotch in one’s early youth may be the product of a certain adolescent pedantry that made working through a supposed avant-garde canon of excellence feel like an obligation — but it can also be taken as a game in which a challenge is accepted. Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) does, in fact, extend an invitation to play with the text by reading it in an alternative order, following a completely different sequence of chapters. Beyond his most famous novel, he is perhaps above all a master of the modern short story, with writing of extraordinary precision and rhythm, able to introduce the extraordinary into the most familiar reality, to blend the everyday with the fantastic or with philosophical reflection. Once again, González accompanies his references to what Cortázar’s works can offer with the anecdote of an encounter with his idol.

Luis González: “One of the jobs I had to carry out for the development of Spain’s first national reading promotion plan was to run a communication strategy, and in that context we reached an agreement with TVE so that at the end of each evening news bulletin a person — famous (say, a model) or unknown (say, a Madrid taxi driver) — would explain what reading brought to their life. One of the well-known figures who agreed to take part was Pedro Delgado, who had won the Tour de France in 1988. In the video we recorded, Perico Delgado explained how important it had been for him to read One Hundred Years of Solitude as he went to rest after each stage of the race — and for me that was a tremendously useful idea for communicating one or two of the favourable impacts of reading on people’s lives: emotional health and the rebalancing of personal priorities. When we presented the initiative at the Madrid Book Fair an almighty storm broke — how could it not, since that is a tradition of the fair? — and I offered to drive Perico to the next place he had to be; for a Segovian like me, chatting with him during that journey was a marvellous experience. During the last London Book Fair I spoke in the main auditorium of the Olympia and, talking about the favourable impacts of reading, I mentioned Perico in order to raise a smile from José Manuel Anta and Fernando Benzo, who were in the audience and who consider me obsessively in love with my home town, as if for me it were the centre of the world. Well, in a way they are right — for is the seat of our childhood not the centre of our world? This labyrinth records those childhood and teenage bicycle excursions through the forest labyrinths of my homeland: experiences I shared as I drove and chatted with Perico Delgado, because he too had emptied his legs on the bends of Riofrío and Valsaín, and on the roads to Pedraza, Sotosalbos and the Puente Uñez. Un laberinto propio also compares the exhaustion of climbing a mountain pass by bicycle with reading: effort brings pleasure”.

What matters most about the presence of Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) in Un laberinto propio is not the memory of a youthful reading (from the period González regards as the peak of pedantry in his life). In this book, The Alexandria Quartet is an especially powerful demonstration of several of its theses about reading. The structure Durrell conceived obliges the reader to play an active role: Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea present different, complementary perspectives on a set of events whose interpretation shifts as the tetralogy advances. The book — or reality itself — proves to depend on the point of view, and the reader must reconstruct it, like someone piecing a puzzle back together. Once again, the claim is that this turns reading into a creative act and an intellectual game, and that the reader interprets the work as a musician interprets a score: making connections, revising earlier conclusions and discovering meanings that had remained hidden. But Durrell’s role in Un laberinto propio does not end there, because he allows another central idea to unfold: fiction trains us to look from other people’s perspectives. To understand that a single event can take on different meanings depending on who experiences it is an exercise in empathy, and a precious disposition for living together in plural societies. The city of Alexandria, moreover, works in the Quartet as a great narrative labyrinth, proving literature’s capacity to build places that end up becoming part of our own memory. Years later, the author of Un laberinto propio went looking in Egypt for the Alexandria imagined in his youthful readings, and discovered that it did not exist outside the books. Perhaps that is a third role of Durrell’s work in this book: to declare another of reading’s powers — creating inner geographies that can accompany us all our lives.

The author of this book came to Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), known as George Eliot, through the influence of some of the women in his life — his mother, his wife — who urged on him the pleasure of immersing oneself in works marked by deep psychological analysis of their characters and an extraordinary capacity to depict social relations. There is something in this author of an anticipatory dialogue with certain aspects later developed by Henry James. From the perspective of the proposals made in Un laberinto propio, to read George Eliot’s novels is to exercise empathy and critical judgement. Her novels oblige the reader to understand different perspectives on a situation, showing that reading literary fiction can be a school for interpreting the human condition, and for forming individual judgement out of empathy and understanding. These are elements that make up Luis González’s concept of “ambitious reading”, of deep reading, and the “higher-level reading” of the Ljubljana Manifesto.

Estrada (b. 1953) appears in Un laberinto propio as the example of an idea the book explores: creativity springs from knowledge, from interpretation and from the connections we are able to make. Known above all for his book cover designs — as well as logos and much else — Estrada starts from an apparently simple principle, though it is far from certain that every designer does likewise: to design a book well you have to read it, because experience taught him that his best covers were born of the works he had read and understood, especially when he could add to that reading a conversation with the author and the publisher. Although González speaks of “cubiertas” (covers), during a conversation between the two in a Madrid restaurant Estrada replies that he disagrees with this insistence on the word, because “the cover merely covers the book; the door is the ‘portada’”. His method turns design into another form of interpretation. Estrada conceives the ‘portada’ as the door through which reading begins even before the book is opened: it must attract and suggest without giving away, while keeping a truthful relationship with what the book contains. The designer thus transforms words, arguments and emotions into an image capable of expressing visually something essential in the work. In Un laberinto propio, the conversations with Estrada make it possible to relate reading, knowledge and creativity. His claim that you cannot design something without understanding it connects with one of the book’s fundamental theses: to create new connections we must first acquire knowledge. Reading provides the materials to work with, and it is a trigger of creativity. As Estrada himself sums it up: “The shortest way to understand a book is to read it”.

Luis Martín García Marcos (1895–1971), the maternal grandfather of the author of Un laberinto propio, appears in the book as a poet and as the transmitter of a literary inheritance deeply bound up with Segovia. His name lives on in the city: in 1928 he wrote the words of its anthem, whose lines on Isabella I of Castile and the Comuneros revolt caused the piece to be banned successively under the Second Republic and the Franco dictatorship, before being officially restored with the democracy of 1978. Segovia was also the matter of his poetry. His sonnet Ceniza en vilo (“Ash held aloft”), for instance, turns the aqueduct into an object of poetic questioning, with the brilliance of attributing to the emphatic materiality of granite a nature as light as that of ash, integrating it with the flight of birds and with the prominence of a light unlike any other. Decades later, those lines come back to the author as he reflects on the emotional meaning of a city whose streets he feels as an extension of the family home. The deepest mark left by Luis Martín García Marcos, however, may lie in his library. The study where his grandfather took his siesta later became his grandson’s bedroom and, finally, the “engine room” in which he was formed as a reader. Those books, first used to build roads for the bottle-top races of childhood games, later led on to Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, Ariosto and Juan de Mariana. That family library also shaped an inclination towards Dickens, British literature and Anglophilia. How can someone who died when the author was seven years old have influenced his life so much? The answer may lie in the fact that earlier generations mark those that follow them through their libraries — and perhaps that is why Clausura (“Enclosure”), his grandfather’s book of poems, still sits beside Dante, Virgil, Eliot, Larkin, Borges and Calvino on the author’s bedside table. In Un laberinto propio, Luis Martín García Marcos thus represents one more of the book’s ideas: readers are also built out of the books, the words and the memories they receive from those who came before them.

Many years ago the Gulbenkian Foundation invited Luis González to lecture on the impact of the digital on reading. Imposing as its great auditorium is, what impressed him most was that the great German thinker Jürgen Habermas (1929–2026) spoke before him, on the relation of these transformations to democratic participation. Before the day began they were invited to have coffee together so that they could talk. When the author of Un laberinto propio defends the relationship between reading and democracy, he does so under the influence of experts such as Miha Kovač, André Schüller-Zwierlein and Anne Mangen, who relate the reading he calls “ambitious” (named “higher-level reading” in the Ljubljana Manifesto) to analytical thinking and, thereby, to democratic coexistence. These arguments can be followed in the part of the book devoted to the disaster of Brexit and the processes that led to that debacle. It is easy, moreover, to detect an underlying link between Un laberinto propio and the books of Jürgen Habermas and his defence of the conditions that make deliberative democracy possible — when this member of the Frankfurt School (the most famous of its second generation) holds that democratic legitimacy depends on citizens able to take part in a public sphere on the basis of arguments, the weighing of reasons and the shared search for truth, as against emotional manipulation or the mere aggregation of opinions. In that sense, the idea that reading complex texts strengthens analytical thinking converges with his conception of communicative rationality. Although Habermas does not develop a specific theory of reading comparable to Miha Kovač’s, he does understand that cultural formation, linguistic competence and the capacity to interpret public discourse critically are indispensable requirements for a free citizenry, and for preserving a democracy resistant to populism and simplification.

Born in Germany, trained in Italy and definitively established in London, Handel (1685–1759) represents one of the most cosmopolitan trajectories in the history of music. He turned London into a European musical capital and created a repertoire that still holds a central place in the Western tradition. His biography illustrates how culture is built through journeys, exchanges and translations, just as books cross borders and transform civilisations. In Un laberinto propio something of Handel’s musical brilliance can be heard as one walks the streets of Mayfair or Westminster past buildings by Christopher Wren.

The literature of Peter Handke (b. 1942) has an especially intense relationship with the act of walking, and that literary reference runs implicitly through Un laberinto propio; its author also mentions him on finding Handke’s works on his own shelves. For Luis González, walking through a labyrinth — forest or urban — changes the rhythm of perception, allows one to pause over what usually goes unnoticed, and turns the landscape into a space where memories, sensations and ideas appear and interconnect. This relation between outward movement and introspection is particularly visible in works of the Austrian author such as The Afternoon of a Writer, Essay on Tiredness and Repetition, but it finds an especially suggestive formulation in the narrative of On a Dark Night I Left My Silent House, which González also quotes at the opening of the book’s final chapter. From the very title — which echoes St John of the Cross — Handke turns his protagonist’s journey into a passage towards the unknown in which physical displacement gradually merges with an exploration of identity. And there is in Un laberinto propio a certain parallel between walking and reading: both activities partly suspend our immediate relation to the everyday and open a space for observation, memory, digression and the discovery of unexpected connections.

Hockney (1937–2026) appears in the final chapter of Un laberinto propio as the sketch of a demonstration of one of its theses: technology can widen the possibilities of creation, but the impulse that makes unexpected connections remains profoundly human. During the pandemic, Hockney worked in confinement at his house in Normandy, using an iPad to record the changes of nature: trees, flowers, water, light, the transformations of the landscape through the seasons. Those works are the protagonists of Spring Cannot Be Cancelled, Martin Gayford’s book built from his conversations with the artist. Years after reading it in the autumn of 2021, a coincidence leads the author of Un laberinto propio to a London exhibition of those images. There he discovers that the digital creations have been arranged as a great frieze the visitor must walk along. The experience unexpectedly links innovation and tradition: Hockney uses a contemporary digital tool, yet converses with the ancient Chinese pictorial scrolls and with the visual narrative of the Bayeux Tapestry. The anecdote thus becomes one of the last pieces of the labyrinth. A few months after the author delivered the final revised version of Un laberinto propio, Hockney died; and in August 2026 Luis González crossed the sandy flats of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens — strangely covered in a mixture of utterly dry grass and sand, in place of the green he was used to — to pay one more improvised visit to the exhibition, which was to close a few days later.

The author of this book has said that the first time he held a text by E. J. Howard he was magnetised within the first ten pages. In Un laberinto propio he records his astonishment at how little presence and recognition this author enjoys as one of the most significant creators of the twentieth century. He has also admitted that, intrigued as he was, he went looking for references to understand why she has suffered that fate. He was therefore delighted to discover an article by Hilary Mantel (author of the fascinating Cromwell novels) defending Howard as an unjustly undervalued author and praising the exquisite quality of an œuvre that was, for far too long, dismissively labelled “domestic” fiction. Luis González has said that in the first of the five novels of the Cazalet Chronicles he perceived a work of art that only a woman could have written, with an approach he finds fascinating and distinct from his own as a man; and he describes the excellence of The Long View with a statement that belongs to his analysis: “Though my allusions to the concept of the ‘labyrinth’ are very repetitive, I must use it once more, for two reasons: first, because I promised that this text you are reading would be a game around a labyrinth of reading; and second, because it is the best way to convey what this novel offers. It is a journey of introspection — The Long View — in which the protagonist makes us relive the things that happened to her in life, in a way that interweaves with the decisions she must take in the present she is narrating, letting us understand how the past shapes the people we become”. He is also grateful to his admired Martin Amis, the writer’s stepson, who was instrumental in persuading her to write again — an activity that gave meaning to her life, as she acknowledged in an interview given a year before her death in 2014: “I’m 90. Writing is what gets me up in the morning”. As elsewhere in Un laberinto propio, the reflections on Howard reveal a deep admiration for the reading of texts written by women.

Ivan Illich (1926–2002) was an Austrian-Mexican essayist whose work questioned modern institutions and defended forms of learning and knowledge grounded in personal autonomy. His link to this book runs through his essay In the Vineyard of the Text, which unravels Hugh of Saint Victor’s ideas on reading and the impact of that monastic orientation on our relationship with books: “When you ride a bicycle between vineyards, the fields are like the pages of a book full of lines. We return to my cousin’s house while all the light that reaches us is golden and lengthens the syllables of the fields through their shadows. With that metaphor I am paying literary homage to that beautiful book by Ivan Illich, in which he shows the reading of the medieval monasteries as an activity in which texts were to be treated as ‘vineyards’ — to be tilled, cultivated and explored, as one selects and grows something organic”.

In The Origin and Goal of History, Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) introduces the concept of “axial moments”: periods that worked as axes of transformation, as pillars for the simultaneous refounding of several cultures across our planet. Luis González rereads some notes he wrote in the first days of the lockdowns and confinements of the 2020 pandemic and finds that he still agrees with himself: it is possible to make an analogical use of Jaspers’s concept in relation to the impact humanity would undergo through the conjunction of the extraordinary circumstances of those years and the processes of exponential social transformation that digitalisation brings. The book recalls the words spoken at the opening of what was probably the first in-person event of that time (the Readmagine conference of 2021), and how the author invoked Jaspers and his concept before an auditorium of people whose faces were covered by masks.

José Jiménez Lozano (1930–2020) appears in Un laberinto propio as one of the writers its author most admires: a novelist, essayist and poet who received the Cervantes Prize in 2002, awarded by a jury on which the author of this book served as recording secretary. The later family visit to his house in Alcazarén confirmed an impression born long before from his books: the profound humanity and kindness that run through his writing. González confesses himself unable to understand why Jiménez Lozano is not recognised as one of the essential authors of the last fifty years. Of all his work, Un laberinto propio suggests that readers begin with El mudejarillo (“The little Mudejar”), his very personal approach to Saint John of the Cross. Jiménez Lozano seeks out the human being who came before the figure consecrated by history: the poor, vulnerable boy from whom one of the essential voices of Spanish poetry would eventually emerge. The implicit question is especially significant for the book: how is a person capable of creating something extraordinary formed? The evocation of Saint John’s arrival in a snow-covered Segovia also establishes another of those connections characteristic of Un laberinto propio, one of those billiard-ball flukes, because literature, landscape, memory and conversation converge in a single image: the fragility of the poet set against the seemingly impossible permanence of the aqueduct.

Kovač (b. 1960) holds an important place in Un laberinto propio because his ideas make it possible to connect the reading of complex texts, analytical thinking and the quality of democracy. When it fell to him to be commissioner of Slovenia’s presence at the Frankfurt Book Fair, he had the idea of launching the Ljubljana Manifesto, in which Kovač and other experts defend the concept of higher-level reading, which Luis González reformulated as “ambitious reading”: a reading that demands concentration, patience, prior knowledge and the ability to find one’s way through long, complex texts. For Kovač, this competence is especially important in an ecosystem dominated by the smartphone, algorithms and a constant flow of fragmentary content. His argument also starts from language: understanding demanding novels and essays requires a vocabulary far larger than the one needed for everyday conversation. That linguistic richness provides tools for engaging with complex realities without automatically reducing them to simple explanations. Un laberinto propio develops this reflection out of successive conversations with Kovač in Mainz, Ljubljana and other European encounters. From them emerges a shared preference for speaking of “analytical thinking” rather than the more ambiguous “critical thinking”. Kovač advances the hypothesis that a society with more readers able to analyse complex information will be better prepared to weigh arguments, live with uncertainty and resist the simplifications that favour autocratisation.

Andrés Laguna (c. 1499–1559) was a Spanish physician, humanist, translator and scholar of the Renaissance whose scientific and philological work turned the reading of classical texts into an instrument for renewing knowledge and passing it on to new generations. This Segovian came from an important family of Jewish conversos of the Castilian city. He is an outstanding figure of European humanism because he represents the Renaissance ideal of the intellectual who unites the study of the classical languages with the observation of nature. He trained at the leading universities of his day and was physician of reference to some of the most powerful people in Europe — and Luis González wonders: “How is it that they haven’t made a heap of films about his life?”. In this Labyrinth there is something of Laguna’s passion for the classical languages, and for trees and plants in general. His celebrated annotated version of Dioscorides’ Materia medica exemplifies a method that confronts the authority of ancient texts with direct experience and rational analysis.

During his adolescence and early youth, the author of Un laberinto propio spent many hours reading the literary works of a supposed intellectual canon (In Search of Lost Time, Hopscotch, Ulysses, The Alexandria Quartet, The Magic Mountain, and so on) and science fiction by Asimov, Lem, Philip K. Dick, Gibson and Clarke. One day he found in a bookshop a copy of The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin and decided to read it on the strength of the description on the back cover. From that moment he threw himself into the rest of the novels of the Ekumen cycle — closer to Asimov — beginning with Rocannon’s World and The Dispossessed, as well as those of the Earthsea cycle, which are rather more “Tolkienian”. This American writer transformed fantasy and science fiction by making them a tool for exploring philosophical, political, cultural and anthropological questions. Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) widened the possibilities of speculative fiction with works that reflect on language, power, identity and social organisation, for both cycles generate imaginary worlds that work as intellectual laboratories in which to question ourselves and understand better the reality we live in. Although the mention of Le Guin in Un laberinto propio is very brief, her weight in the author’s biography as a reader can be detected in his digressions on the world-building of Tolkien, in the reflection on the possibilities of fiction he identifies in Borges and Italo Calvino, in the speculative dimension he shares with Isaac Asimov and even — remarkably — in Karl Popper and the intellectual openness towards possible alternatives.

In Un laberinto propio, the expression “reading wine” serves to widen the meaning of reading beyond words. The analogy is born of an experience shared with José Luis, the author’s cousin and a professional of the world of wine, whose way of describing aromas, textures and flavours reveals nuances that might pass unnoticed by someone less experienced. To taste a wine is, in this sense, to interpret sensory information and to reconstruct from it the story of a grape, a territory and a set of human decisions. The parallel with books begins even before that interpretation. Picking up a volume, we take in the cover, the typography, the paper, the layout of the text; before a glass, we attend first to colour, clarity, density. Then the “reading” proper begins: we look for meanings in the one case and recognise fruity, floral, earthy or smoky notes in the other. The comparison allows one of the recurring ideas of Un laberinto propio to unfold: perceiving better can also be learned. Experience widens our capacity to distinguish, relate and interpret. The more books we have read, the more connections we can make before a new text; the more wines we have tasted with attention, the more nuances we can recognise. Reading and tasting both mean, in the end, pausing, paying attention and elucidating what we have before us.

Macfarlane (b. 1976) appears in Un laberinto propio through two works its author recommends without reservation, works that open up one of the book’s central analogies: the relation between “walking, reading and discovering”. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane travels the ancient paths of Great Britain and other territories — including the Guadarrama mountains, so important to Luis González — and describes how the landscape preserves the traces of those who have walked it. This joins the idea that walking becomes a way of reading the territory and, at the same time, of exploring one’s own inner landscapes. It also connects with the structure of Un laberinto propio, conceived as a journey in which the reader may stray, make connections and find their own paths through the ideas of the text. The second reference to this author goes deeper — literally — into that idea, through Holloway, in which Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards explore the “holloways”: ancient paths sunk by centuries of passage and covered by a vault of vegetation. Macfarlane proposes walking paths that seem to reach beneath the forest and beneath the layers of time, bringing traces of the past to the surface — an experience the author of Un laberinto propio relates to the idea of “elucidating”: drawing something out of darkness to make it visible and comprehensible. In this complementary metaphor, reading is conceived as a journey along paths that others opened before us, and also as an elucidation that lets us enter their forks, recover hidden connections and bring to the surface meanings that lay beneath it, so that the labyrinth ceases to be a place in which to get lost and becomes a territory in which to discover.

For generations of Spaniards, the teaching of literature has held up Machado as one of the great figures of Spanish letters. In another setting than the book, González has remarked: “My grandfather, a poet, had dealings with Antonio Machado (1875–1939) during his time in Segovia, and my great-aunt Carmen was a pupil of his. In those years the clumsy carelessness of his dress was so striking that it could stir a feeling of pity for the man who is one of the great Spanish poets of the twentieth century — and of the whole history of literature in my language”. There is much of Machado hidden in this labyrinth, for it shares his pursuit of simplicity and his spiritual delight in walks beside a river, as well as the influence of those car journeys between Madrid and Segovia with the author’s parents, to the sound of Machado’s poems as sung by Serrat.

Manguel (Buenos Aires, b. 1948) is an Argentine-Canadian writer, essayist, translator and editor, internationally recognised for his reflection on the history of reading, on libraries and on the relationship between books, memory and imagination. In another forum Luis González has said: “I will never forget a walk I took with him through León Cathedral in 2006 (shortly before he gave a lecture on reading at a congress our foundation had organised). I was astonished as, along the way, he shared with me a deep knowledge of the Bible and of the iconographic traditions of the Gothic. I also remember how he nodded and smiled when I told him that he was giving me a reading of everything I could see but could not unravel, because I was illiterate in that hidden language written in the stained glass and the other images”. Few contemporary authors have contributed as much as Alberto Manguel to understanding reading as a cultural, intellectual and deeply human experience. This book quotes some of his ideas on reading, and there is a convergence with certain of his accounts of the evolution of reading from Antiquity to the digital era.

The relationship of Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1941) to Un laberinto propio works on two levels: there is a tacit, hidden presence across many passages of the book, and then, on reaching the appendix of recommendations the author offers to round off the reading, he seems to feel compelled to include this master of Japanese anime. In formulating that second level, the author ties him to one of the book’s central ideas: a work can admit different levels of reading, and each person builds their own interpretation out of their knowledge and experience. Miyazaki’s films can be enjoyed for the beauty of their images and their sense of adventure without any need to decipher all they contain; but a closer look reveals layer upon layer concerning nature, technology, war, work, identity, loss and the passage into adulthood. This superimposition of meanings is there from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and reaches particular complexity in films such as Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. Forests, sky and water are like living territories — characters in their own right — often labyrinthine in form, where the protagonists lose themselves, are transformed, and learn to deal with forces they do not control. Miyazaki also enters Un laberinto propio through an intimate experience of interpretation: the author remembers watching Spirited Away with his daughter when she was very small. Father and daughter were looking at the same images, yet inevitably watching different films. That experience reproduces what happens with books, since every reader interprets the same work from a different place — so much so that one can return to it years later and find meanings that had remained invisible.

Ignacio Moreno Gozálvez (b. 1962), author of the novel El encanto (“The charm”) and a colleague of the author from the same intake into the civil service corps to which they both belong, appears in Un laberinto propio tied to two activities that are essential to this book: conversing and walking. Moreno’s professional career, with postings in the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia, also supplies the cosmopolitan background of a friendship sustained across the years and across a variety of places. The first time they shared long conversations was during their walks through London, when they were young students at the British Civil Service College, and Ignacio invited him to visit a friend who had a Calder sculpture in the hall of his house in Chelsea, from which one could watch Charlotte Rampling going into hers. Un laberinto propio recalls a conversation during one of the two periods when Ignacio was posted to the Spanish Embassy in Moscow, which gave rise to the nickname “Casandro” that González bestowed on him. After a prediction about an extraordinary political event, defended for more than a year, had come true, Moreno turned to the myth of “Cassandra”, able to foresee the future yet condemned never to be believed. The anecdote serves to introduce a reflection on readers’ capacity to detect incipient signals — which can be connected, once again, with the etymology of “to read” in Latin and in the Germanic languages — to imagine possible futures, and also on the very different difficulty of convincing others of those hypotheses. In a more recent London episode, Ignacio plays another role: that of someone who shares a piece of knowledge, an earlier discovery, with a friend. An unhurried walk across Hampstead Heath takes them to Kenwood House, where the almost intimate contemplation of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Canaletto, Constable, Gainsborough and Turner becomes an unexpected gift, before the route ends at the historic Spaniards Inn. Both episodes condense a way of proceeding that is quite characteristic of Un laberinto propio: “conversations and walks open unforeseen paths towards new ideas, places and experiences”. Sometimes understanding consists precisely in walking in company.

In Un laberinto propio, the Movida madrileña appears as the lived experience of a city which, after decades of dictatorship, seemed suddenly to recover colour, curiosity and, above all, the desire for freedom. The Madrid of the early eighties is discovered through small venues where the different forms of culture mixed continually. The author shares some impressions of those years at Rock-Ola, where you might hear Simple Minds, Depeche Mode or Echo and the Bunnymen and, on other nights, Movida bands such as Radio Futura, Nacha Pop, Aviador Dro, Gabinete Caligari, Parálisis Permanente, Derribos Arias or Glutamato Ye-yé. Musicians and audience shared the same venues, while the Rastro, La Bobia, El Penta and La Vía Láctea formed part of a cultural geography that extended into record shops, bookshops and comic shops. Reading this part of the book gives access to the sensations of a city in transformation, and the Movida comes to stand for something more than a music scene: it is the memory of a generation discovering music, books, images, people and ideas all at once, in an atmosphere of collective experimentation. Within Un laberinto propio, that experience connects with one of its central ideas: culture prospers where there is freedom to explore, to mingle, to make mistakes and to strike unexpected connections — as when, unexpectedly, Madrid became an extraordinary labyrinth of possibilities.

Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982), by Walter J. Ong, is a fundamental reference for the author of Un laberinto propio: it was a crucial discovery to find Ong (1912–2003) arguing that writing constitutes a “technology of the word” — far from being a natural activity, learning to read and write means acquiring a cultural technology that reorganises our cognitive processes and changes our relationship with knowledge. For most of history, human beings lived in cultures of “primary orality”, without knowledge of writing. In them, thought had to be organised so that it could be remembered and transmitted by voice: repetition, formulas, rhythm, narratives, proverbs, and a close binding to concrete, collective situations. Reading and writing introduce a decisive rupture, because they separate the word from the person who utters it and turn language into a stable, visible object that can be examined again and again: the book. Once knowledge no longer depends exclusively on memory, or on speaker and listener being present at the same time, more analytical, abstract, cumulative and introspective forms of thought are favoured — a thesis that bears directly on the idea of “reading as a human technology” in Un laberinto propio.

Johannes Parix of Heidelberg appears in Un laberinto propio in connection with the arts of the book, serving as an enigma to be solved in order to address the relations between reading, printing and a society’s capacity to innovate when it is open. He was the printer of the first books made in Spain, arriving in Segovia around 1472 at the call of Bishop Juan Arias Dávila. The book proposes, however, that his itinerary was more complex than a simple journey from Germany to Castile. Through an investigation deliberately narrated as a detective story, a possible trajectory is reconstructed: Heidelberg, Rome, Segovia. Parix would have belonged to that first generation of German printers who, after the technological revolution begun by Gutenberg and the conflicts of Mainz, moved towards Italy in search of opportunity. In Rome he would have perfected his craft: the roman type he later used, his knowledge of certain incunabula and other textual traces make it possible to hold — as Romero de Lecea does — that he worked in those workshops. Parix thus embodies several of the central ideas of Un laberinto propio, such as human creativity and the way innovations travel with people; the printer carried type, tools and techniques, but above all a knowledge acquired through experience and through contact with his colleagues. His story also shows that creativity and progress arise from connections: here Germany supplied the initial technology; Rome, an ecosystem in which to perfect it; Segovia, the economic, cultural and political conditions in which to put it to work. Parix allows some passages of this book to read as detective fiction, reconstructing the history of the first Spanish printing press as a profoundly European trajectory — through a labyrinth of people, cities and knowledge connected by the technology of the book.

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) has interested the author of this book for many years, and his Diary has been constant reading. Un laberinto propio underlines the capacity of those memoirs, especially the entries for 1660–1669, to carry readers into the everyday experience of seventeenth-century London. Pepys was something like a civil servant of his day, and he writes about his work at the Admiralty, the theatre, music, money or desire with an immediacy that almost lets us hear the streets, feel the cold beside the Thames and perceive what the author of the book calls “the scent of time”. That quality takes on a special intensity during the Great Plague of 1665. The way fear progressively transforms his entries, and the way the count of the dead acquires an obsessive presence, lead the author to relive how inevitable it felt to connect them with the moment when statistics were a kind of daily ritual during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was proof, once again, of how something read at another time could unexpectedly provide references for interpreting the present. A year after the epidemic, Pepys also witnessed the Great Fire of London of 1666. His diaries allow readers to watch the catastrophe as it unfolds. Pepys demonstrates one of the most powerful capacities of reading: entering the life of someone separated from us by centuries and discovering that their uncertainties, fears and desires can help us understand our own experience.

Perec (1936–1982) was a writer, essayist and member of the Oulipo whose work renewed contemporary literature through formal experimentation and a very particular attention to everyday life. In Un laberinto propio, Georges Perec is cited as an invitation to understand reading in its playful, exploratory dimension. His fiction invites the reader to join a game of observation, associations and discoveries, underlining that to read is not merely to follow a story but to live it as a game, one in which every detail may take on an unexpected meaning. Luis González writes his text facing the great bookcase he has installed in his new home, having “survived” a house move that involved the painful experience of managing a collection of several thousand books. In front of him he sees his copy of Life: A User’s Manual, and that sets off his thoughts on the possibility of living this reading like a video game. Georges Perec is one of the most original figures of twentieth-century French literature. His writing combines the rigour of experimentation with a deep sensitivity to memory and the experience of the everyday. He took formal constraints as engines of creativity, though his work is much more than technical virtuosity: in it converge loss, the trace of childhood, inhabited spaces, common objects and the most insignificant gestures, turned into literary matter. For the author of this book, Perec’s works exemplify how reading is an exercise in observation of an unusual kind, revealing that everyday reality holds an inexhaustible narrative complexity. There is an element common to Un laberinto propio and Perec’s works: the book presents itself in its preface as a game of billiards in which the reader follows a series of caroms that carry them from one concept to the next.

When the author of this book speaks of Karl Popper (1902–1994), he tends to say that reading The Open Society and Its Enemies was a “fall from the horse on the road to Damascus”, reinforced by his later access to The Poverty of Historicism and other texts. He recounts, on the one hand, how a question Jorge Semprún asked him over dinner set off a search that led him to understand his own unconscious reluctance towards Plato; and, on the other, how reading Popper led him to many more works of an epistemological nature, works in defence of doubt and of freedom. This approach can also be turned, today, into a defence of ambitious reading as a way of creating knowledge through the formulation of hypotheses continually submitted to criticism and possible refutation — and of its link to the defence of democratic institutions, pluralism and intellectual freedom against every form of dogmatism or totalitarian thought.

For the author of Un laberinto propio, Potter (1866–1943) is bound up with some of the happiest moments of his life: going up to his daughter Inés’s room, when she was four or six, to share with her the reading of a great many titles by this British writer, illustrator and naturalist who renewed — or invented? — children’s literature by combining, in a unique way, emotional storytelling with rigorous observation of the natural world, turning the landscapes of the Lake District into a space of imagination, and of learning how to live alongside the woods and the rest of the animals. Beatrix Potter plays an important role in this book because she serves to set out its ideas on the power of reading in childhood (and how it improves each person’s prospects). This author builds a universe in which Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny, Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and Mr. Tod are humanised animals that keep traits of their own nature and allow children to explore how the world works — relationships, living together and, above all, the magic of stories. Potter is fundamental because she was the first to integrate text and illustration into a single narrative unity, consolidating a model of the children’s book in which formal beauty and respect for the reader’s intelligence are the priority. If we follow the approach of Un laberinto propio as a game of caroms among the text’s other references, we might link Potter’s conception of landscape with Robert Macfarlane’s; her valuation of imagination with certain aspects of Tolkien’s; and even connect these early readings with Maryanne Wolf’s research on how we learn to read.

This English composer lived through the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666 in his childhood — events that seem so to obsess the author of Un laberinto propio, because for him that era drives the emergence of a modernity that binds together the market economy and parliamentary democracy. Purcell (1659–1695) consolidated a distinctively English musical tradition and contributed decisively to the development of musical theatre and Baroque vocal music. We can link him with Handel, London, Shakespeare, Samuel Pepys and the cultural evolution of England.

Reading The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries (b. 1978), provided one of the references for The Startup of the Book, the book Luis González wrote with Nina Klein in 2015. Ries proposed replacing grand plans built on uncertain hypotheses with “validated learning”: a continuous process of development, evaluation and learning that allows one to experiment, test users’ responses and make successive adjustments. The Startup of the Book carried that logic into the world of reading, asking how libraries and the publishing industry could innovate in a context marked by digitalisation. The proposal was to abandon a merely defensive position towards technological change and to use some of the dynamics of startups to improve readers’ experience, encourage the socialisation of reading, experiment with new services and build alliances between libraries and European digital companies. To this was added a “fluid” conception of content: understanding intellectual property as a creative raw material capable of taking different forms — printed book, e-book, audiobook, film, series, comic or video game. More than a decade later, Un laberinto propio takes up those ideas again from a position more cautious about the growing power of the great platforms, but keeps its fundamental wager: the world of the book must play an active role in digital innovation rather than confine itself to resisting it.

Rome plays a role in Un laberinto propio that goes far beyond that of a city visited or admired. It is, above all, a metaphor for Europe as a space built up through successive layers of knowledge, culture, creativity and technology. Hence the author’s provocative claim that Europeans are still, in a certain sense, “citizens of the Roman Empire”: the European Union appears as a radically different reality, yet bound to a common inheritance that can be recognised from Segovia to Saintes. Rome is also a crossroads in the history of the book. Juan Parix’s imagined trajectory links Heidelberg, Rome and Segovia: the Roman workshops would have given the German printer typographic knowledge that would later travel with him to the first Spanish printing press. The technology of the book is thus presented as the outcome of European movements, apprenticeships and connections. But the deepest image comes from a family trip. During a walk with his daughter Inés, the author proposes reading Rome as one reads a palimpsest: Piazza Navona can be peeled back from Bernini and Borromini to the stadium of Domitian, while the Segovia of his own childhood reappears through Vespasian and his aqueduct. This experience condenses one of the proposals of Un laberinto propio: reading means discovering connections and making visible what lies hidden beneath the surface. And Rome is felt, for that reason, to be an almost infinite book.

Sadek (b. 1962) is one of the leading voices on the application of artificial intelligence to the world of the book, and it was almost inevitable that he should come into contact with the author of Un laberinto propio, since the relation between the digital and reading is a fundamental theme of this work. Sadek has in fact spoken at the last three forums on AI organised by the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez (PARIX IA in 2024, 2025 and 2026) at Casa del Lector (Madrid). Before founding Shimmr AI, Sadek created companies in tourism, brewing and music; and from his training as a psychologist he argues that AI should not be conceived solely as a threat to authors and publishers, but as a technology capable of extending human creativity and improving the connection between works and their potential readers. Hence his proposal to speak of “Allied Intelligence”, with the emphasis on collaboration between human beings and machines. This perspective was first formulated specifically for the publishing sector in Shimmer, Don’t Shake: How Publishing Can Embrace AI (2023), in which Sadek studies the relationship between the history of publishing and the development of artificial intelligence, paying particular attention to a problem decisive for books: “discoverability”. His company Shimmr AI tries to answer that problem with technologies that analyse the narrative and psychological identity of a work — its “book DNA” — in order to connect it with potentially interested readers. Two years later, Quiver, Don’t Quake: How Creativity Can Embrace AI (2025) presents artificial intelligence as a creative collaborator and develops concepts such as Allied Intelligence, Calibrated Trust and The Panthropic — his idea that in conversing with an AI we gain access to a kind of compression of the knowledge and expression accumulated by humanity.

Saintes, and the old French province of the Saintonge in Charente-Maritime, occupy an especially intimate place in Un laberinto propio — one that also yields something for every reader of this book. For they are not merely the setting of several summers (in that of 2025 the writing of this book began), but a territory from which the book leads us to reflect on Europe, on landscape, and on the pleasure of getting lost and emptying one’s legs. Cycling along the banks of the Charente, through the vineyards, the marshes and the woods of the Côte Sauvage turns the territory into another of the book’s labyrinths: paths that fork, force you back and awaken curiosity about whatever lies half-hidden among the trees. Saintes also serves as a miniature of Europe. Its Arch of Germanicus, its amphitheatre, the remains of its aqueduct, its Romanesque churches and its limestone buildings strike immediate connections with Segovia. Reading these passages, we see that the differences matter as much as the likenesses: Europe appears not as uniformity but as a network of distinct places bound together by centuries of exchange and complexity. The French craftsmen who carried the Romanesque to Castile are one example of that circulation of techniques, forms and ideas. There is, finally, a personal dimension. After several summers of returning to the district, its streets, markets, houses and landscapes produce an unexpected sense of belonging. Feeling at home far from home makes it possible to understand physically one of the ideas of Un laberinto propio — our identity is built through connections — and so Saintes (the “Mediolanum Santonum” of Roman times) is linked with Segovia, Mainz, Rome and other cities, forming a personal geography in which readers of this book are invited to walk, remember and read, as if these turned out to be very similar activities of discovery.

Antonio de Sancha (1720–1790) is usually counted among the great printers in the history of Spain. His role as a publisher is now increasingly recognised too, insofar as he produced carefully revised editions of the Graeco-Latin classics and of the principal Spanish authors, shaping a catalogue that helped to professionalise publishing in Spain and to bring fundamental works to an ever-wider public. In an age marked by the growth of learned societies and the drive to spread knowledge, he made his workshop a byword for typographic precision, editorial elegance and respect for texts. The figure of Sancha reminds us that the history of reading does not depend on authors alone, but on the whole value chain of the book, through which it becomes possible for books to reach readers in the best condition. In Un laberinto propio several passages are devoted to the “arts of the book” as part of the experience of reading, dwelling on typography and cover design, because all of this constitutes what a book proposes.

Another of the reading recommendations gathered in Un laberinto propio is Ian Bostridge’s Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession, which offers new perspectives to anyone drawn to walking, music and literature. As González puts it: “Bostridge gives us a guide to understanding that journey through winter across the countryside and, at the same time, the inner journey of the existential monologues gathered in Wilhelm Müller’s poems”. Franz Schubert (1797–1828) died at barely thirty-one, yet left an extraordinary body of work that transformed the music of Romanticism; his contribution proved especially decisive in the Lied, where music ceases to be a mere support for the voice and comes to share in the narration, to reveal psychological states and to transform the poem. Although Un laberinto propio deals especially with the Winterreise, the composer’s magic extends to the symphonies, the quartets, the chamber music and the piano sonatas. One of Schubert’s most singular traits is his treatment of musical time: repetition, the expansion of melodies and unexpected modulations create the sensation that the music is not advancing straight towards a conclusion — a kind of invitation to remain inside it. Another great creator, Robert Schumann, put it memorably on discovering Schubert’s great Symphony in C major: he spoke of its “heavenly length” (himmlische Länge) and compared it to one of Jean Paul’s vast novels that seem never to end, so that the reader can go on creating afterwards. He did so in an article in which he writes: “And this heavenly length of the symphony, like a thick novel in four volumes, by Jean Paul, for example…”. Jean Paul was the pseudonym of Johann Paul Friedrich Richter (1763–1825), one of the great writers of German Romanticism and one of Schumann’s favourite authors — and the comparison is apt in the context of Un laberinto propio, because Schumann praises Schubert by likening him to a literature that lingers, digresses and leaves the reader room to go on creating, a quality that prolongs the experience in the imagination, just as González’s book unfolds its ideas on digression, the labyrinth and reading as a creative act. These concepts can also be linked to the interior monologues of German-language literature, in authors such as Walser, Kafka and Handke.

Segovia holds a central place in Un laberinto propio. It is, first of all, a geography of memory: the city of childhood holidays and weekends, of games among Romanesque churches and city walls, of walks in the Eresma valley, and of a family library that ended up becoming the “engine room” where a reader was built. Reading this part, we feel we can picture our own relationship with reading in childhood and youth. That is why its streets form an almost domestic space in which books, music, people and memories keep making connections. But Segovia is also a city that can be read: beginning with the light that fascinated María Zambrano, the Roman aqueduct, the churches, palaces, workshops, squares and old Jewish quarters form the successive layers of a historical text. Walking through them, one can relate Rome to Castile, the French Romanesque to the aqueduct, the textile trade to the palaces, political history to daily life. That capacity for connection between very different paths explains another of its meanings in Un laberinto propio: Segovia as a European node of knowledge and innovation. In the fifteenth century it kept up intense intellectual ties with Rome through humanists and churchmen such as Juan de Torquemada, Rodrigo Sánchez de Arévalo and Juan Arias Dávila. That network favoured Johannes Parix of Heidelberg installing there, around 1472, the first Spanish printing press, producing the Sinodal de Aguilafuente and other early printed works. The innovation also found a city with industrial activity, technical knowledge, trade, specialised artisans and a relatively open society: an early example of economic and social complexity. Segovia could be said to gather up many of the book’s essential ideas, mixing personal memory with European memory, reading with technology, freedom with creative complexity. Above all, it demonstrates one of the contributions Un laberinto propio offers its readers: understanding often consists in discovering the invisible connections between things that seemed separate.

Exactly a hundred years before the Great Fire of London in the reign of Charles II — which so obsesses the author of Un laberinto propio — William Shakespeare (1564–1616) wrote, in a single year, no fewer than three plays that are utterly different from one another yet imperishable: As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Alongside those plays, that same year a certain Mr Jaggard made a good deal of money printing and selling a pirated edition of sonnets by Shakespeare under the title The Passionate Pilgrime (sic), that is, The Passionate Pilgrim. In reality, only some of the poems were Shakespeare’s, but all of them appeared attributed to him. From this we may infer that the printer wanted to trade on the renown of “the Bard”, and it is, precisely, proof of the fame he already enjoyed in his lifetime. In the book, Shakespeare’s presence is tied precisely to the Sonnets and to the bilingual edition prepared by Agustín García Calvo. The chance to read the English original and its poetic versions side by side opened a decisive door onto English poetry for the author many years ago, and he also found García Calvo’s prologue revealing, with its analysis of the contradictions about love that run through the poems. Years later, during the house move that is described as a nightmare when it came to shelving the books, two copies of that same Anagrama edition turned up. One belonged to the author; the other had been bought by his wife Emma after he recommended it to her at one of the first dinners they shared when their relationship was beginning.

The author of this book has written elsewhere: “More than two decades ago I had a drink with George Steiner and managed to chat with him a little after a wondrous lecture he gave at the Círculo de Bellas Artes. I have no doubt he sensed in me a degree of emotion akin to what I would have felt chatting with Kate Winslet, Halle Berry or Alfred Brendel. I have read several times an œuvre that is immense, and it is a source of pride to see Un laberinto propio published by the same house, Siruela, that has given Spanish readers those marvellous editions of his works. Steiner (1929–2020) was British and American, born in France, but above all he had the profile of a Jewish intellectual — literary critic, essayist and philosopher of culture. In this labyrinth to which I am inviting you there is a deep imprint of his reflection on reading, on language and on the ethical responsibility of the humanist tradition in the contemporary world, as well as on the place of the classics in our education. When my daughter Inés was four I decided to go up to her room every night and slip in, among the usual readings of Beatrix Potter and fairy tales, a reading of the Iliad in the Alma Mater edition. Obviously she understood nothing. If I kept up this ‘proposal’ for only a very short time (barely two weeks), the fault was Steiner’s: when he was six, his father opened a book with Homer’s text, a dictionary and a grammar, and together they deciphered, word by word, the reply of Achilles. That discovery, he writes, was the decisive moment of his intellectual life, and I seem to remember he ends by saying: ‘Perhaps everything else has been a footnote to that hour’. It is a thing of beauty — and a madness too, is it not?”.

In his essay On Fairy-Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) argues that fantasy is a useful way of generating knowledge, capable of offering an innovative view of reality through imagination. One of this author’s achievements is to have managed, through his deep knowledge of Germanic culture, to steep generations of readers — and, in recent decades, of filmgoers — in the traditions that lie beneath Europe. The author of Un laberinto propio acknowledges that Tolkien’s works drew him into immersive reading, and that they connected with the powerful sensations he has always had when walking through a wood: “The magic of reading is its capacity to imprint sensations and thoughts with such intensity. I remember reading The Hobbit at the end of my childhood, and how it felt to walk with Bilbo and his companions, the dwarves, through Mirkwood for forty pages. I imagine many people will have had the same experience: the moment you finish that book, the first thing you need to do is open The Lord of the Rings with all urgency; for me, the ninety pages of the second book (The Two Towers) devoted to the journey through Fangorn forest are unforgettable”.

Publius Vergilius Maro (70–19 BC) has accompanied the author through most of his itinerary in this labyrinth about reading. For if there is a poet who can help us converse with our lives as we walk woodland paths, it is the Mantuan — long his companion, with the complete works on the bedside table, in his vision of what it is to be European and of how we relate to nature. Luis González recalls in this book the occasional episode in which he has taken to reciting some of Virgil’s lines from the Georgics in Latin. Virgil also accompanied Dante, and it is easy to imagine him strolling with Milton or T. S. Eliot, for the author sees him as the founder of a European — or Western — vision that weaves the stories of Homer together with the ancestral traditions of our Celtic, Germanic and older substrates. That is why he imagines two brothers tracing the founding perimeter of his Castilian city upon the rock that Unamuno and others compared to a ship; and why, at the end of October, he sees in those smoking rooftops, and in the long shadow cast by the Guadarrama mountains, the beginning of the winter cold.

Wagner (1813–1883) works as a metaphor for one of the essay’s central theses: effort is necessary to reach a greater pleasure. The author of this book had to spend years following the Radio 2 (now Radio Clásica) broadcasts of the Bayreuth Festival (whose 150th anniversary falls in the very year Un laberinto propio is published), reading several books about the tetralogy and its author, and linking those operas to his readings of chivalric romances, or to other works of philosophy that led him to connect the Ring cycle with the passage from the world of the gods to the world of human beings. Just as certain books only reveal their full richness when the reader agrees to give them time and concentration, certain works of Wagner — for Luis González the ones that matter are the tetralogy, Tristan and Parsifal — only begin to be enjoyed once they are understood. The caroms this labyrinth plays off this composer glance on to other names, such as Dante and Tolkien.

Walser (1878–1956) was a Swiss writer of the German language whose work, of extraordinary subtlety and originality, is another exploration of the gaze, the walk and everyday life. Scanning the shelves of his library, Luis González permits himself a brief digression on German-language literature: “If you have got this far, I assume you are a patient, curious person with a solid history as a reader; even so, if you have never accompanied Walser on his nocturnal, incoherent, obsessive walks, I dare to recommend him — even if only in small doses”. His narratives — frequently led by observant characters touched, in some degree, by the mental illnesses that the writer and other members of his family experienced — shift attention away from great events towards the humblest details of the everyday, to reveal in them an unexpected depth. But above all there are in Walser walks, brief conversations and contemplation — a great deal of inward contemplation — that become the very centre of his writing.

Weber (1864–1920) was a German sociologist, economist and historian, among whose works stands The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which the author of Un laberinto propio takes up as a piece with which to relate reading and the creation of wealth. Weber’s thesis links the Protestant ethic to the rise of industrialisation in the countries of northern Europe, contrasting that enormous economic growth with the rural economy and poverty of the countries of southern Europe, owing to their Catholic tradition. Luis González, however, proposes that the key to that unequal evolution is none other than reading: from the moment Protestantism established that all believers must read the Bible for themselves, a literacy spread through those countries that would carry with it the transmission of knowledge, the empowerment that comes through reading and the consequent generation of wealth — unlike the Catholic countries, where reading was reserved to a small number of the learned. González also finds relevant, from a democratic point of view, Weber’s concept of the “rational legitimacy” of power as against “traditional legitimacy” and “charismatic legitimacy”, for understanding the role of public administration — seen from his own experience as a former civil servant.

The book describes the conversations with the researcher Naomi Baron about the advantages of reading in print and the neural significance of the paper medium. Naomi Baron’s latest book carries a foreword by the person with the greatest worldwide standing in the general study of the reading brain: Maryanne Wolf (b. 1950), one of the leading contemporary researchers in the neuroscience of reading. Her work has contributed decisively to understanding how the human brain develops the capacity to read — a skill that is not innate but the result of a complex process of neural adaptation. Her research combines cognitive psychology, linguistics, education and neuroscience to analyse how we learn to read, the difficulties associated with dyslexia, and the impact of digital environments on attention and comprehension. In works such as Proust and the Squid and Reader, Come Home she defends the importance of deep reading as a practice that fosters reflection, critical thinking, empathy and the capacity to make complex connections between ideas. Her work is an essential reference for understanding the challenges written culture faces in the digital age.

Woolf (1882–1941) is a near-constant presence in Un laberinto propio, and its author ends by declaring: “If someone asked me the main reason why reading a novel or a story by Virginia Woolf fills me the way it does, I would begin with her singular way of attending to time and to life, as if both unfolded not in straight lines but in sensitive undulations, forming a… labyrinth”. Likewise, when González invites his readers to join him on his London walks, he readily admits that there are certain clusters of streets he feels as the stage on which Woolf’s characters — Mrs Dalloway among them — unfold their stream of consciousness and let us into their inner experience. Her very death might be seen as a connection between the flow of consciousness and the flow of the waters of the river Ouse. Even when he tries to explain his admiration for the writing of E. J. Howard, he compares it to the way this member of the Bloomsbury group plays with consciousness in To the Lighthouse. What in her day was called “literary modernism” can now be seen as the beauty of a body of work far ahead of its time — and perhaps of ours. Thus, for example, Luis González observes that “in a novel as apparently ‘chronological’ as Orlando, history stops being a succession of dates and becomes a shifting, nebulous experience”. She created a delicate art, between the narrative and the lyrical, offering fiction founded on details whose meaning is discovered by a personal sensibility and finally projected, dramatically, through the minds of others (as can be observed to perfection in Mrs Dalloway). These are some of the reasons why a book like Un laberinto propio introduces its readers to her universe.

The author turns to a text by María Zambrano (1904–1991) to explain an experience lived on the first occasion when he was able to leave Madrid during the pandemic. There is a moment when he is left paralysed by the intensity of the emotions and the depth of the memories, and he explains part of that through one of her texts most closely bound to the city where the philosopher lived when her father taught at a secondary school and founded, with Antonio Machado, the Universidad Popular Segoviana. Zambrano’s text is called Un lugar de la palabra: Segovia (“A place of the word: Segovia”) and in barely twenty pages the philosopher builds an interpretation of the city in which thought and poetry prove inseparable. This brief essay returns at an especially significant moment in the book. In June 2020, on the first day travel between provinces was allowed after the lockdown, the author goes back to Segovia to visit his parents. Walking very early through a city he perceives as extraordinarily clean, luminous and beautiful, he immediately remembers Zambrano’s words about its light. For her, Segovia does not simply receive the light: it seems to rise until it reaches the level at which light exists. This connection ties in with one of the recurring ideas of Un laberinto propio: reading changes the way we look. After encountering Zambrano’s text, the light of Segovia can no longer be contemplated in quite the same way, because González is able to reproduce her words to express what he feels at that moment and in that place, allowing him to communicate — and to make perceptible to whoever reads the book — something that perhaps remained invisible.