Night train to Lisbon, Bille August, 2013

A red coat to be returned to a saved and lost woman, a book that asks many questions, an author to discover, tickets for a train to Lisbon and a new pair of glasses, to better see the reality around and inside.

Thus begins the literary, philosophical, historical and personal journey of a common man, Raimond Gregorius, a banal professor of dead languages from Bern who, through words, would like to make his own the surprising life of Amadeu Ignacio de Almeida Prado, a Portuguese author, ' goldsmith of words' and active protagonist of the resistance against the regime of António de Oliveira Salazar.

The nostalgic reconstruction of Amedeu's life becomes the mission and meaning of Gregorius' life, upsetting it in a completely unexpected and fascinating way in a few days. The professor adopts the author's words and the profoundly philosophical reflections that praise freedom of action and thought, the here and now, chance as the only director of life, intimacy and imagination as the only sanctuary, the importance of secrets for a man and the uselessness of immortality which would diminish the value of life. And again, to the death that gives it meaning and whose fear is actually the fear of not being able to become who and what we would like.

Gregorius' journey is a journey in two directions: while he retraces the stages of the life of the author who bewitched him, he discovers, from time to time, a hidden part of himself which, otherwise, stuck in his comfort zone, would never be come to know, how true it is that every reader reading a book reads himself.

And assuming that at the end of the exploration he returns home, no journey returns the same as when he left. 'We travel within ourselves when we return to places that have been significant and where we have left a part of us that we could only find by returning there. The significant moments have a light and slow step, they are imperceptible and can only be distinguished after a long time, when perhaps we realize that right at that point we veered off and taken a diametrically opposite direction to the one that made us what we are.

From the book by Pascal Mercier, a film by great performers and on great questions that revolves around lives and how they are capable of changing by colliding or brushing against each other even at different geographical distances and over the years and the hidden power of words that keep a content in their form much more important than what they show, assuming that there is the curiosity and the will to question them.

So yes, a book is as good as a journey, inside and outside oneself, and that the lives of others, even if only by imagining them, change ours.