One reads nonfiction to understand the world and fiction to shut down all possible explanations—because, at some point, nothing makes sense. Yet real literature gives a taste of what never made sense, turning living into not seeking answers but feeling the unbearable lightness of being.

Sometimes, I feel the urge to unplug. To silence the marketing tricks, the shouting headlines, the capital letters of Black Friday. To step away from the relentless chase for money, glory, and relevance. I crave silence—real silence. And what greater silence exists than the written word? Through it, we find not emptiness but entry into a universal quiet, a vastness where meaning quietly pulses.

Reading Cortázar is agreeing with the idea that “a chance encounter is the least chance-like thing in our lives.” Thank God for the rejection of jobs I didn’t want, of paths I wasn’t meant to walk. Here’s to giving birth to the creative energy of being a free artist of life: walking not to find oneself, but to rediscover the pieces of me left behind.

Only Cortázar could take the grim, gray Paris of my imagination and transform it into something magical. His words, written in the 60s, made the city shimmer—something I wouldn’t fully grasp until I visited decades later and felt a strange, melancholic energy. That beloved literary Paris no longer exists. Nostalgia swells in its place, a nostalgia that feels like both a wound and a cure.

Cortázar knew it: “You must first close your eyes, and then the yellow stars appear, followed by the red leaps of your mood and the hours.”

His characters, like the Sibyl, are enchanted by implausible situations. In her world, natural laws lose their grip, and she’s always deeply engaged in something extraordinary.

To believe that action alone could fulfill us, or that a sum of actions could equal a meaningful life, is, as Cortázar says, the illusion of a moralist. Renunciation, instead, is where truth lies—not as defeat, but as protest. Renunciation is the cry of rebellion, the mask torn away.

For those like her, mystery doesn’t end with explanations—it begins there. They revel in the risk of getting lost: spending a day alone, furious and alive at the bottom of a café, or perched on a park bench with yet another book.

Hopscotch is a labyrinth, a playground, a puzzle for the soul. To read it is to leap into Cortázar’s endless stream of thought—a child’s game turned philosophical odyssey. “The notion of progress in art is absurd,” he writes. And isn’t it? What even is progress?

Cortázar doesn’t give us progress, he gives us stars, sowing syllables to reap constellations. His world is mystical, luminous, and raw. I invite you to step into his magical game, to rediscover the child within—the one that reason and routine have silenced.

Here’s one of his most beautiful declarations: “Nothing is lost if we finally dare to proclaim that everything is lost and that we must start again from scratch.”
Isn’t that life? Every day, every breath, a tiny resurrection. And yet, it takes a poet—or perhaps a madman—to waste more than five minutes on nostalgia in this hyper-capitalist world. A society so blind, blind, blind.

“In this indecision at the crossroads of choice,
In the net of reality I ignore,
I wait for myself in vain.”

“I am the world,” Cortázar writes, “the external plan, the other who looks at me.”

And then comes the ache—the unquenchable desire: to run, to leap into a train, to step into a bookstore, to devour entire libraries. To learn German, to chase the worlds hidden in forgotten languages. The melancholy of a life too short for all the books we long to read.

Somewhere along the way, we lost it—our hopscotch, the game of leaps and bounds that taught us how to navigate the spaces between chaos and clarity. We traded spontaneity for schedules, wonder for reason, and the infinite joy of wandering for the grim pursuit of progress. It’s time to draw our hopscotch once more, to leap without knowing where we’ll land, to find magic in the in-between spaces. It’s time to reclaim our Hopscotch.