BARBARA CAPPONI / BABAS

the ABC of happiness in twenty-six Retablos

I feel safe inside books. I open that little door and disappear into another dimension. In the jungle, by the ocean, in a cabin in a snowy forest. I am a boy, a tiger, a wizard, a warrior, a gnome who lives in the hollow of a tree, a poet who has escaped to Paris. And nothing bad can happen to me, because in the meantime, while I’m fighting and falling in love and climbing a mountain, I’m spread out on the sofa, or in bed, with a cat on my belly. Yes, life can be wonderful.

Books keep you warm in winter and cool in summer: they are proof that humanity, after all, can do good. They are magical objects that contain stories, characters, emotions, ideas. They are friends. Almost all of them; some books even have an intoxicating power, but I won’t take those into consideration here.

Here I want to talk about the books that make me feel safe. The first is “My Family and Other Animals” by Gerald Durrell. I open it and I’m twelve and it’s an endless summer afternoon: there are only beautiful things.

To celebrate the books that made me happy, I created the only 26-piece edition of a Retablo. Like the letters of the alphabet. Of course, there are many more. But you have to set limits.

Gerald Durrell, Kipling, London, Stevenson, Salgari, Saki, Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, Tolstoy, Cortazar, Vonnegut. To start.

Every time I make one of these Retablos I feel a little burst of happiness. When they become someone else’s Retablo, my happiness increases. Beautiful things must be shared. We learn from Durrell.