Parents often ask me how they can explain to their children why they should read. I usually give a few arguments that smart parents could use when talking to their children about the benefits of reading even without my recommendation. But after I was persecuted and bullied while working at university, I looked at my arguments from a different angle. There are such difficult situations in life when no one can help you, and you hear from your family and friends in response to a request for advice: “It's only you who can decide for yourself.” At such moments, you're left alone with your problem, you're confused, you don't know what to do or what to do, and time and circumstances urge you to do the right thing, the right words on which your future life may depend. You run through your eyes absently at your bookshelf and suddenly decide to borrow from it that someone gave you but didn't have time to read it.
And you start flipping through it right there, by the shelf, and suddenly you find someone unknown from page 174 giving you a helping hand. You're clutching at it and diving into the text for someone who just responded to your silent call for help. It is impossible to predict what kind of book it will be, and which character will save you or your child in a difficult situation. My friend and savior was Don Juan, the hero of Carlos Castaneda's books and short stories. I can't explain how it happened that I came across this particular collection, but I immediately realized that I needed it. I started reading and writing quotes in my notebook, which I often returned to in order to keep my spirit up, keep myself from breaking down, chickening out, and retreating. If someone had told me a few months before they started bullying me that I, a doctor of philology and university lecturer, would find protection from Carlos Castaneda, the half-crazy and mystical hero of books, I would not have believed him. But help came from a place I didn't expect at all—from a book that I would never include in my “100 Best Books” list. However, you can also find a pattern in this random choice. I studied martial arts and was familiar with spiritual practices that at that time I did not appreciate as important and applicable in modern life. For me, “The Warrior's Way” was just an ancient text that didn't capture me even when I was making progress in tai chi chuan. But the time came when I had to really fight, and I didn't know how to do it, how to overcome my inertia and fear in order to even fight. The literary hero Don Juan told me how to do this with the least possible losses.
Once upon a time, together with a colleague who later became my mobber, we conducted a survey among high school students about their attitude towards the heroes of Russian classical literature they studied at school. As a result of the survey, the majority of children insisted on preserving classical works in the school curriculum. They reasoned their choice, among other things, by the fact that one of the characters (Chatsky, Pecherin, Onegin, Raskolnikov, Pierre Bezukhov, Master, etc.) helped them by example, when they were especially lonely, no one understood them, and when they made it into stories that seemed to have no way out. One boy wrote that the novel “The Master and Margarita” saved his life. I can't say that Don Juan saved my life, but it's pretty clear that he helped me fight back then.
Here are some of Don Juan's quotes from my notebook. They reflect the scapegoat's request and the answers he needs to support his fortitude in the face of emotional abuse. I hope that my reading experience will help another scapegoat to find his Don Juan in life, in literature, in film, and to cope with circumstances in which it is difficult but possible to maintain self-esteem and self-esteem. And, of course, I'm happy to think that now potential victims of emotional abuse — children and adults alike — will have not only books and movies to help them gain fortitude, but also our site mobbingu.net.
Don Juan spoke
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