A Brief Manual for Stopping the Wind

“Complete stillness of the air”—that is how the Royal Spanish Academy defines calma in one of its latest entries. The word comes from Greek and refers to sailing: those windless days when the sea lies tranquil. From Polyphemus to Aeolus, classical tradition reminds us of the power of the winds—they can bring you home or drive you far from it, but they always stir you.

The wind itself is nothing new; it has always blown, with greater or lesser force. What seems different now is the way it shakes us. Political instability, distrust in institutions, the erosion of community bonds, information overload, uncertainty, relentless self-demand, the absence of leisure… These new winds push us closer, drive us apart—they unsettle us. How do we resist such agitation? What can we cling to when nothing feels stable, when everything shifts, when—let’s face it—we’re no longer in Kansas?

Spaces of total stillness are rare. The wind wears out the body—travel, work, obligations, family visits, distance, exhaustion—but it batters the mind even more: that email, the doctor’s appointment, we’re out of milk, I’m running late, the cardboard for school, improve your English, I haven’t gone to the gym, is Dad taking his pill?

In storm season, seeking refuges of calm becomes urgent. Beyond collective solutions—which do exist and must not be dismissed—there are few individual ways to resist this restlessness. Only one comes to mind, and Alonso Quijano foresaw it: “Believe me, and as I’ve told you before, read these books, and you’ll see how they drive away melancholy and improve your disposition, if by chance it’s bad.”

Reading is a kind of captivity. One must remain still—at most, a gentle sway, like a hammock, a child’s rocking. The eyes cannot wander; they must stay stitched, like a shadow to a heel, to the page. The brain suffers the hardest sentence: there’s no reading while thinking of something else; you either think, or you read—you can’t do both.

In a whirlwind world, sitting down to read grants that complete stillness of air. No easterly, trade, mistral, or north wind can compete with the calm of an open book and all it entails: a body at rest, eyes settled, a mind—almost—quiet.

The best part? It doesn’t matter what one reads—it’s pure magic. The trick works with a bestseller, a medieval codex, essays on fluid mechanics, or a comic book. The process, at the risk of echoing Tip and Coll’s “glass of water” sketch, goes like this: find a book that calls to you, make yourself comfortable, open it, and start reading. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. The wind knows how to blow—a timid breeze, a phone notification, an intrusive thought. Don’t give in, for behind that breeze the hurricane often hides.

Every so often, the fruitless debate resurfaces about whether reading makes us better people, as if suggesting a direct link between the width of one’s bookshelf and the depth of one’s moral fibre. Reading doesn’t make us better, but it helps us inhabit calm—to take shelter from the wind so that we might row again with renewed strength, to sail, like Paris—a city of great epic and little sea—on the swell of the waves, without sinking.

“Because you sweep me along and I go,
and you tell me to turn back,
and I follow you through the air
like a blade of grass.”

Federico García Lorca, Bodas de sangre

By Raquel Cernuda