“Insane people are angels who, unable to bear the realities around them, must somehow take refuge in another world.” – Reinaldo Arenas
At the beginning of his autobiography about life under the Cuban dictatorship of Castro, Arenas states that, “if you cannot live the way you want, there is no point in living.” This book however is a testament to the struggle to live, regardless of the costs (even and inevitably death), it is a scream before the fading light, an honest and impassioned plea for the ability to be free against all oppressive and dehumanizing systems. Reading it will make you want to run out into the street and kiss the first person you see, especially if you live in a place where doing so will land you in prison. Despite years of the most extreme intellectual and sexual oppression, watching all of his friends either be imprisoned, turn informer, or commit suicide, despite years spent in prison himself (which he compares, in most horrific detail, to the last circle of Dante’s Hell), Arenas never abandoned his integrity, his need to see and write out of a love for liberty and love itself, even if it meant hiding in a culvert on the run scribbling before night falls.
If the insane are angels who cannot bear this reality, it is only the greatest of artists who can angelically bear it, and lift us all above the horrors of the world. In so doing, Arenas gives each of us permission, and in fact the imperative, to live every moment truthfully and passionately as possible, before, as may happen in any time or place ruled by power and money, even that basic freedom to live is stripped away.
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