وتروي السلسلة مجموعة من القصص الواقعية على لسان طبيب نفسي يعمل في إحدى المستشفيات تتعلق بمرضاه المختلفة حالاتهم، لاسيما الفتيات منهم، ساردا أغرب الحكايات التي يبدو بعضها أقرب إلى الجنون من المنطق!
Under the roof of a modest hostel in a poor neighborhood in the Chilean capital, a strange group of guests meets, including workers, trade unionists, students, traffic police, and performance artists. Let them all witness the last days of the rule of the Popular Union headed by Salvador Allende, before the bloody coup led by General Pinochet took place and changed the history of Chile forever. Thus, this hostel turns into something similar to an operations room through which some Chilean leftists try to protect the socialist government and stand up to fascism. And among all of them, Arturo, the braggart and virginal football player, coming from the south to the capital, and burdened with dreams of fame and unsatisfied desires, tries to discover himself and determine his position on everything that is happening around him.
“I Dreamed That the Snow Was Burning” is the first novel by Chilean writer Antonio Scarmeta, and one of his most important works. In it, the features of a special, diverse style are established in terms of rhythms and narrative techniques, in which imagination blends with reality, and in which sarcastic humor alleviates the harshness of dramatic events. The book is a living document of the dialogues, conflicts, and popular mood that prevailed in Chile at the most pivotal moments in its history.
Beauty Café: A person's life is not devoid of many hardships: the departure of a loved one, the deterioration of health, the loss of money, the loss of a position... but despite all of that, we must continue to move forward, we must be optimistic, smile, and look to the future with eyes full of hope. We must cling to the moments of joy, and bite them with our jaws. Clinging to the moments of joy, from my point of view, is more useful than forgetting sadness. The heart is an open space for all feelings. If it is occupied by joy, it is narrowed by sadness, and if it is occupied by sadness, it is narrowed by joy. What we should be most wary of are moments of depression, as they are the ones that eat away at our lives without stopping, eating, eating, eating until they lead us to disappear. We are not alive because we wake up every morning, breathe, eat, and walk. We are alive for other reasons that are deeper and more closely related to the essence of life. We are alive because the passion is still within us, the passion to explore more in our lives, more that we don't know, but that we know we need.
Boatman:
Whoever reflects on what people say and do, arrives at the almost certain conclusion that they say one thing and do the complete opposite. You find them praising the philosophy of such-and-such thinker and the depth of his theses, but they do not follow his programs or read his publications. In return, they criticize such-and-such artist’s lifestyle and superficiality. Her ideas...but at the same time they follow all of her work, and do not miss an episode of it.
Personally, I am not surprised by this contradiction, for a fundamental reason... which is that it is an inherent part of human nature in all places and times... and the words that I am writing now, the great sociologist Abdul Rahman bin Khaldun preceded me six centuries ago, and perhaps many scholars before and after him... Therefore, we must recognize that the inherent natures of human beings do not change radically, but rather develop and improve if they find something that helps them to develop and improve.
It often happens that human natures remain as they are, stagnant, if they do not find the intellectual and moral nourishment that elevates them to the highest level. It also happens that they relapse, become brutal, and go back for many years if the nourishment is negative and worse off than before.
Consider the condition of the societies around us. Some of them have a better present than their past, and others have a better past than their present. The whole reason is due to the nature of the intellectual and moral nourishment to which their members are exposed.
