Só um verdadeiro idiota

“[I] could see things only a truly aimless idle, idiot would notice”

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Cidades

“Why should we expect a city to cure us of our spiritual pain?”

Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul, Memories and the City


Também não faço ideia, mas sei que poucas coisas curam ou estragam como cidades certas ou erradas. E depois há aquelas que são e fazem as duas coisas ao mesmo tempo.

Dá-lhes, Bellow

“Humboldt had become boring in the vesture of a superior person, in the style of high culture, with all of his conforming abstractions. Many hundreds of thousands of people were now wearing this costume of the higher misery. A terrible breed, the educated nits, mental bores of the heaviest caliber!”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Estados Unidos da América

“America was a harsh trial to the human spirit. I shouldn't be surprised if it set everyone back.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Casos

“A Case can be a work of art, the beautiful version of one's sad life. Humboldt the poet used to perform his Case all over New York. But these Cases are bad art, as a rule.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“Kafka himself of course was crammed to the top with this same despairing fastidious mocking Consciousness Soul. Poor fellow, the way he stated his case didn't do him much credit. The man of genius trapped in the insurance business? A very banal complaint.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Lugares que não o são

“...it was now apparent to me that I was neither of Chicago nor sufficiently beyond it.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Lugares que não o são

“And suddenly Chicago was not my town at all. It was totally unrecognizable. I merely imagined that I had grown up here, that I knew the place, that I was known by it.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Tédio

“The intellectual future of Europe was determined by people impregnated with boredom (...). Boredom has more to do with modern political revolution than justice has. In 1917, that boring Lenin who wrote so many boring pamphlets and letters on organizational questions was, briefly, all passion, all radiant interest. The Russian revolution promised mankind a permanently interesting life. When Trotsky spoke of permanent revolution he really meant permanent interest. In the early days the revolution was a work of inspiration. Workers peasants soldiers were in a state of excitement and poetry. When this short brilliant phase ended, what came next? The most boring society in history. Dowdiness shabbiness dullness dull goods boring buildings boring discomfort boring supervision a dull press dull education boring bureaucracy forced labor perpetual police presence penal presence, boring party congresses, et cetera. What was permanent was the defeat of interest.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

“Suppose then that you began with the proposition that boredom was a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, and was accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities. (...) Nothing actual ever suits pure expectation and such purity of expectation is a great source of tedium. People rich in abilities, in sexual feeling, rich in mind and invention — all the highly gifted see themselves shunted for decades onto dull sidings, banished exiled up in chicken coops.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift


Gosto muito de narradores que não são de se fiar. Não sei se é um sacana a gozar com as nossas ilusões ou um pateta perdido nas suas, mas funciona bem de qualquer maneira. Sim, é claro que é tudo potencial por realizar, intensidade sexual, profundidade intelectual, reféns de uma tendência trágica para o perfeccionismo e de um sociedade que não percebe, diz o leitor agradecido, sublinhando a passagem, de peito mais leve, dormindo melhor nessa noite.

Maiúsculas

“What else can result from the capitalization of such nouns? Myself, I've always held the number of sacred words down. In my opinion Humboldt had too long a list of them — Poetry, Beauty, Love, Waste Land, Alienation, Politics, History, the Unconscious. And, of course, Manic and Depressive, always capitalized.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

Nunca faz

“Such brooding didn't make him any saner.”

Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift


Nunca faz, mas não é por nada que mais tarde o mesmo narrador que condena Humboldt diz de si mesmo: “clinically speaking, I guess the problem was hysteria. Philosophically, I came out better”. Confundir excesso de auto-consciência com profundidade, ou amuo contra o mundo com heroísmo, sempre foi bastante sedutor; e ao contrário de outras vaidades zangadas que se pagam cedo e caro, esta pode manter a ilusão de sustento indefinidamente. Cansa que se farta, nota-se tão bem que vão cansados, mas já não sabem desejar outras companhias, outro fado, e a pátina intelectual deste amuo é tão convicente, não acham?

Escritores leitores

A veces me pregunto qué razones
me mueven a estudiar sin esperanza
de precisión, mientras mi noche avanza
la lengua de los ásperos sajones.
Gastada por los años la memoria
deja caer la en vano repetida
palabra y es así como mi vida
teje y desteje su cansada historia.
Será (me digo entonces) que de un modo
secreto y suficiente el alma sabe
que es inmortal y que su vasto y grave
círculo abarca todo y puede todo.
Más allá de este afán y de este verso
me aguarda inagotable el universo.

Jorge Luis Borges, “Composición Escrita en un Ejemplar de la Gesta de Beowulf”

Diários de uma monja apócrifa

“he lived in a curious combination of splendour and asceticism”

John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice