The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa Page B

knowing it, many people forget their fourteen-year-old kid, but I think that the important thing is to go back, dive in, and build bridges back to that moment. It’s like swimming along the bottom of a swimming pool, going through a little tunnel and ending up in a littler swimming pool; that’s where the fourteen-year-olds are. Speak to them, exchange things with them, and rescue what you can for the larger pool.
    The fourteen-year-old kids make us complicated, various. It’s a difficult period, one in which we make our most important decisions, the decisions that mark our characters. The problem is that sometimes we forget; sometimes we think that we were mistaken and try to build ourselves from the beginning again.
    I think it’s good to build yourself up on the basis of what you already are: go back to the foundations, go back to the fourteen-year-old. The basis of what you are is certainly there. The basis of what you want to be. Now that I think about it, this could be another discovery, number twenty-four. But I’ll leave it here.
    Just trust in the twenty-three discoveries. Trust in them and they’ll come true. And now let’s go to the yellows.… The time has come!

Do you think it’s right that an engineer should write poetry?
    Culture is an ornament; business is business
.
    If you stay with that girl you’re not welcome in our house
.
    That’s living
.
    —Gabriel Celaya

The Yellows
    We’ve reached one of the chapters that I think is the most important and that makes me the most excited to write. I’m very keen on talking about the yellows.
    You have to know that it’s 1:41 A.M. on an August night (when I revise the chapter it’s 11:08 on an October morning). I’ve always believed that positioning the moment of writing, the day (it’s early Thursday morning), gives everything a far greater reality. (The revision takes place midmorning on a Tuesday.) It’s a dimension that you don’t normally get when you read a book. When did he write this? Where was he? What was the weather like?
    A few months ago I was lucky enough to interview Bruce Broughton, the composer of famous soundtracks for movies like
Young Sherlock Holmes
and
Silverado
. We spoke about the possible variables that can influence the creative process: your partner? The place? The temperature? He thought that above all creativity has to do with the way you receive what you see and how you transform it. Your own speed of transformation.It was really a great luxury to listen to someone who was so overflowing with creativity, although he acknowledged that his own speed of creation changed depending on whether he was alone or not, how hot it was, and how much he could concentrate.
    But let’s not get off the main topic: the yellows. As well as being a chapter of the book, they also give the book its original title. It’s the great treasure that I gained from cancer. You can always learn something that takes you three steps or three miles further than the rest; there will always be an Induráin, a Borg; * there’s always someone or something that stands out. And if you know, as I think you do, that I like lists, there has to be a well-ordered way of explaining why some things stand out.
    This will be a long chapter, and because I don’t want to get lost I’ll try not to get sidetracked. Especially since if there’s one thing I want you to take from reading this book, it’s the idea of the yellows.
    I hope that within a few months people will be looking for yellows, will use this term to describe them, will adopt it fully. There are words and phrases that appear and become popular, sometimes because of bad things (
tsunami
), sometimes because of good things (
Internet
), sometimes just because of the way fashions change (
metrosexual
). It’s not that I particularly want to invent a new term, but I think it’s necessary to have a word that defines this concept. Conceptsneed words to define them, like people need names. There was a