I even then said, imagine, I was 18 years old, my classmates asked me what I wrote about in my books, and I said:
– I don’t want to tell you.
– Why not?
– Because you’ll all laugh and won’t understand.
– Why won’t we understand?
– Because you’re all closed off, I expressed it that way.
– Come on, Alex, tell us.
– No. When something happens to you, when it hurts, that’s when you’ll understand, and only one person at a time. Well, there were just two friends back then. I said: When something happens to you or you, write to me, call me, and we’ll meet and talk heart to heart.
– Why is it like this?
– Because then you won’t have that superficial attitude, the laughter, you’ll be somehow deeper, I don’t know, maybe.
And that’s how it is. When you talk to a friend at a moment when something has hurt them, it’s all so sincere, as sincere as it gets. But when a person is all excited, tipsy, scattered, how can you talk to him about something? About deep or spiritual things. He’ll immediately turn on his defense mechanism and start laughing. So these people immediately start mocking or laughing at it. To distance themselves from it. And so it turns out that books were always read by people who got into the “corridor,” that’s why my book was, and not just one, but many of my books mentioned this state of the “corridor.” When your world has collapsed, and a new one hasn’t been built yet, but at the same time, your head is clear, you’re here and now, you hear everything, you see everything. And at that moment, a person can read a book. And when he’s all excited, he can’t read such a book anymore. And so, what should happen for people to start reading books, as you write, asking what they will be interested in? What will happen to people that they will start to be interested in something else? Well, I assumed back when I was little that if people were going to read my book, then, consequently, it would mean that all people would start to be interested in something deep, and that something would have to happen in the world,