Body and Soul - Tom Harrel

Caio Fernando Abreu

"Hoje, acho que sei. Um dragão vem e parte para que seu mundo
cresça? Pergunto - porque não estou certo - coisas talvez um tanto
primárias, como: um dragão vem e parte para que você aprenda a dor
de não tê-lo, depois de ter alimentado a ilusão de possuí-lo? E para,
quem sabe, que os humanos aprendam a forma de retê-lo, se ele um dia
voltar?

Não, não é assim. Isso não é verdade.

Os dragões não permanecem. Os dragões são apenas a
anunciação de si próprios. Eles se ensaiam eternamente, jamais
estréiam. As cortinas não chegam a se abrir para que entrem em cena.
Eles se esboçam e se esfumam no ar, não se definem. O aplauso seria
insuportável para eles: a confirmação de que sua inadequação é
compreendida e aceita e admirada, e portanto - pelo avesso, igual ao
direito - incompreendida, rejeitada, desprezada. Os dragões não querem
ser aceitos. Eles fogem do paraíso, esse paraíso que nós, as pessoas
banais, inventamos - como eu inventava uma beleza de artifícios para
esperá-lo e prendê-lo para sempre junto a mim.

Os dragões não conhecem o paraíso, onde tudo acontece perfeito
e nada dói nem cintila ou ofega, numa eterna monotonia de pacífica
falsidade. Seu paraíso é o conflito, nunca a harmonia."

Taksim

David Foster Wallace

"The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.

because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing."

trecho do discurso de paraninfo para o Kenyon College. Foi publicado na Piauí, edição 25, um mês depois do suicídio do autor.

Trilok Gurtu

Mulatu Astatqe

Rabih Abou Khalil

Le Clezio - The Interrogation

You feel as though you were waiting for something, don't you? Something unpleasant - unpleasand rather than dangerous? - isn't that right? You feel as though you were waiting for something unpleasant. Well, listen to me. I'll tell you. It's the same with me. I have the same impression of waiting. But you must realize one thing: I personally shouldn't worry about the impression of waiting, except that i'm positive that's bound to happen - that this unpleasant something - or - other will inevitably happen to me sooner or later. So that now, in point of fact, it's no longer something unpleasant that i'm expecting, it's something dangerous. You understand? It's simply a way of keeping one's feet on the ground. If you'd told me what you haven't told me, for instance, that you have the impression of waiting for something that you know, you understand, you know that it must be death, then okay. I understand you. Because there always comes a day when one proves to be right in waiting for death. But you understand, don't you, that what matters is not the unpleasand impression, but the fact that not a moment goes by without our consciously or unconsciously waiting for death. That's the point. You know what that means? It means that in a certain system of life which ine puts into application by the mere fact of existing, you're leaving a negative element - which as it were, perfectly rounds off the human unit. It reminds me of Parmenides. You know, what he says, I think: "How, then, can what is be going to be in the future? Or how could it come into being? If it came into being, it is not; nor if it is going to be in the future. Thus is becoming extinguished and passing away not to be heard of"That is the way to talk. One must have an inkling of it. Otherwise, Michele, it's not worth being able to think, Talking's not use you know Michele, no use at all"

Albert Camus - The Mith of Sisyphus

"That nostalgia for unity, that appetite fot the absolute illustrates the essential impulse for the human drama. But the fact of that nostalgia´s existence does not imply that it is to be immediately satisfied. For if, bridging the gulf that separates desire from conquest, we assert with Parmenides the reality of the One (whatever it may be) we fall into the ridiculous contradiction of a mind that asserts total unity proves by its very assertion its own difference and the diversity it claimed to resolve. This other vicious circle is enough to stifle our hopes.

There are again truisms. I shall again repeat that they are not interesting in themselves but in the consequences that can be deduced from them. I know another truism: it tells me that man is mortal. One can nevertheless count the minds that have deduces the extreme conclusions from it. It is essential to consider as a constant point of reference in this essay the regular hiatus between what we fancy we know and what we really know, practical assent and simulated ignorance which allows us to live with ideas which, if we truly put them to the test, ought to upset our whole life. Faced with this inextricable contradiction of the mind, we shall fully graps the divorce separating us from out own creations. So long as the mind keeps silent in the motionless world of its hopes, everything is reflected and arranged in the unity of nostalgia. But with its first move this world cracks and tumbles: an infinite number of shimmering fragmenst is offered to understanding. We must despair of ever reconstructing the familiar, calm surface which would give us peace of heart. After so many centuries of inquiries, so many abdications among thinkers, we are well aware that this is true to all our knowledge. With the exception of professional rationalists, today people despair of true knowledge. If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its sucessive regrets and its impotences.

Of whom and of what indeed I can say: "I know that!" This heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize the self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all thos likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this origin, this ardour or these silences, this nobility or this vileness. But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine will for ever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. For ever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no trhuth. Socrates "Know thyself" has as much value as the "be virtuous" of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great subjects. They are legitimate only precisely in so far as they are approximate. And here are trees an I know their gnarled surface, water and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes - how shall I negate this world whose power and strenght I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me to classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases. At the final stage you teach me that this wondrous and multi-colored univers can be reduced to the atom and that the atom itself can be reduced to the electron. All this is goos and I wait for you to continue. But you tell me of an invisible planetary system in which electrons gravitate around a nucleus. You explain this world to me with an image. I realize then that you have been reduced to poetry: I shall never know. Have I the time to become indignant? You have already changed theories. So that science has to teach me everything ends up in a hypothesis, that lucidity founders in metaphor, that uncertainty is resolved in a work of art. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the hand of evening on this troubles heart teach me muchh more. I have returned to my beginning. I realize that if through science I cn seize phenomena and enumerate them. I cannot for all that apprehend the world. Were I to trace its entire relief with my finger, I should not know any more. And you give me the choice between a description that is sure but that teaches me nothing and hypotheses that claim to teache me but are not sure. A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in wich I can peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults? To will is to stir up paradoxes. Everything is ordered in such a way as to bring into being that poisoned peace produced by thoughtlessness, lack of heart or fatal renunciations."