A book a day: Bernd Brunner: Living horizontally

Original Language: German

Títutulus original: The art of lying down. Horizontal life manual

Translation: José Aníbal Campos González

Year of publication: 2012

Valoración: Curious

I do not know if there is any reliable statistics on how many books have been published throughout history. They are undoubtedly thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, from the most remote cultures to the same current, in all languages ​​and for having, at all times and formats, scrolls, booklets, letters, catechisms, touching all known genres and their derivations. And in all that flood of books all the topics have been touched, either from fiction or from the will to transmit knowledge about any matter. So surely there have been precedents, Bernd Brunner himself quotes some, but there will be many texts that refer to something as human as a posture, the position of the body in which all the humans who were, are and will be a good part of our life. Some more than others, it is true, and for very diverse reasons. But ultimately something that unites us without remedy and without exceptions: we are all every so often in horizontal position.

Of course, you can build an entire book about this obvious and so well known, but it is not so easy either. What do we talk about? Do we start with our curtured ancestors in caves, or do we move towards rudimentary fields built with some straw or branches? Do we talk about Roman custom, I don’t know if also Greek, eating lying down? Perhaps something similar to a bed story, with its structural modifications or the importance of its placement according to Feng Shui? Did we touch social or political segmentation to see the powerful repanting while the subjects stood? Yes, all these issues are touched by the book, together with many others related to sleep, their schedules and medical aspects, the ideal postures for babies and those preferred in the shared bed, the influence of the East in the rude European customs, associated absurd apparatus (at least theoretically) to rest and relaxation.

As you can see, it is an inexhaustible source of issues that we could obtain from a simple brainstorming, because we can all think of ideas related to the horizontal position of the human being.

Many of them are deducted by the author over about thirty chapters, three or four pages each, in which he is reviewing with a hint of humor, rather a little, so many possible points of view. The reading is pleasant, light, perhaps too light, because, being honest, the theme is original but also quite inconsequential. The consequence is that we read with pleasure but without much interest, inviting the text to stop in some curious and little more detail.

I fear that the matter does not give much more, apart from comments from some humorous look, because if someone intends to do an anthropological or cultural analysis of more Enjundia, it might be causing the reader to be transposed, either in that horizontal position or in some alternative, with variants call armchair, sofa, hammock, lobby or land of earth, under a tree on a tree on the grass, or in the sand.