When I found out about the task of making friends with an old book, it seemed very ideological to me. Andrés Ximenez’s book ‘Descripcion del Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de el Escorial’ is written in Spanish, a language that I do not understand at all. This was the obstacle to the task. But I learned how to understand a book in a different way. If the book had been written in a language that I understand, I could have developed a deeper friendship.
Communication was the problem of our friendship. In the first task not in the linguistic sense, but rather the communication from individual to ‘individual’. You really had to tease out the answers, there wasn’t much to find about it. Perhaps our friendship was doomed to fail here. In architectural terms: the base was missing.
Thanks to the second task, we got a little closer. When making an appointment, a few things came up and, in the end, it was only enough time for a short midnight snack. But I began to understand the opponent and the character of ‘Descripcion del Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de el Escorial’ on the surface. It was one of these evenings with friends you feel pretty good afterwards. Thanks to its detailed structure, I understood what was important to my friend and where the depth was with him. Still, I could never reach it. Maybe we are too similar. We both have a hard shell.
Our third date got a bit bumpy again. I don’t know yet whether I did something wrong or showed too little initiative. But I didn’t get much out of it. I think that was the moment when I slowly lost interest and it never really came back.
Our fourth meeting was weird. It seemed forced. We just talked about what was necessary. Have hardly exchanged. I only spoke in very simple and concise sentences with ‘Descripcion del Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de el Escorial’ and after the meeting I no longer felt that we would understand each other as well as on the second date.
Now we were still forced to meet again. We even had to report on our friendship. There really wasn’t much interesting to tell about. I felt the distance between the two of us and I think the others did too. Three out of five seemed to get along pretty well. So we; me and ‘Descripcion del Real Monasterio de San Lorenzo de el Escorial’ and someone else in our library felt more like outsiders. We couldn’t fit into the conversation and after this meeting we never met.
Sometimes it happens in life. You get to know each other, suddenly get on well and think you can share everything with each other. There is a bad time and suddenly you see the mistakes of the other or also by yourself and realize that does not fit. With us, communication was simply the problem. I have been able to experience many times how this has led to major problems and I am glad that we were able to live apart easily and uncomplicatedly.