Pequenos sóis

The idea that stars might be suns had been proposed by the Italian philosopher and writer Giordano Bruno. In his On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, published in 1584, Bruno wrote that “there can be an infinite number of other worlds [earths] with similar conditions, infinite suns or flames with similar nature ...” (For his astronomical proposals as well as his denial of other Catholic beliefs, Bruno was burned at the stake in 1600.) By the early 17th century, various thinkers entertained the idea that stars might be suns. Thus, when Galileo reported blemishes on the sun, his findings had dramatic implications for all of the stars. The stars could no longer be considered perfect things, composed of some eternal and indestructible substance unlike anything on earth. The sun and the moon looked like other material stuff on earth. In the 1800s, astronomers began analyzing the chemical composition of stars by splitting their light into different wavelengths with prisms. Different colors could be associated with different chemical elements emitting the light. And stars were found to contain hydrogen and helium and oxygen and silicon and many of the other common terrestrial elements. Stars were simply material—atoms.

 Alan Lightman, aqui, sobre a nossa compreensão do céu e das estrelas.

A peculiaridade humana sempre a atrapalhar os «ismos»

[...] não ignoro que o jogo da oferta e da procura seria quase mecânico e, portanto, domínio isento de moral, se nele não interviessem homens. Mas onde há um homem, há liberdade e responsabilidade.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Memória de um Inconformista.

Carcanhol

Por exemplo, chegava a casa, no dia um de cada mês, com um envelope em cujo verso figuravam certos algarismos. Fazia as contas, e dizia para mim próprio: se o meter numa caixa, e todos os dias tirar tanto, tem que me durar até ao dia quinze. Mas acontecia que não. No dia dez já não havia nada. E em casa diziam-me: «É como se deixasses o frasco do álcool aberto.»

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester, Memória de um Inconformista.

Domingo no mundo (52)

Jacques Louis David, Retrato do Sr. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier e esposa, 1788.

O mundo ou a alcova

Vivemos numa época em que os pecados sociais adquiriram especial relevo e gravidade, porque são os que nos afectam. E o mais grave de todos eles é a transformação dos homens de fins em meios, essa concepção instrumental do próximo que é a coisa mais anticristã que se inventou. Como gostaríamos nós, cristãos, que os senhores pregassem contra ela e deixassem para o confessionário os pecados de alcova, tão monótonos, tão invariáveis, iguais hoje aos que cometia o rei David, nem mais nem menos, e tão frequentes hoje como em qualquer tempo passado! Além disso, são difíceis de evitar pelas leis do mundo, ao passo que os outros, se se criasse uma consciência colectiva adequada, poderiam ser evitados.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester numa crónica de 1964 (in Memória de um Inconformista).

Rua Cinco de Outubro

Como num quadro de georges, o
de la Tour, era do interior
das coisas que saía a luz
mais leve, a que poisava e
ficava nos dedos das crianças,
a que trocava de lugar com
a noite e o esquecimento.
Por isso, provavelmente, tão
cedo se perderam as vozes
sem máscara, sem o peso
estrangeiro da usura, sem
o logro disfarçado das imagens.
E agora é tarde. Ninguém
regressa a um lugar ausente.

José Carlos Barros, O Uso dos Venenos.

Munch (1863-1944) revisitado num restaurante

Nada separa o Auto-Retrato Depois da
Gripe (c. 1919) e o Auto-Retrato Entre o
Relógio e a Cama, iniciado em 1940 e
concluído em 1942, em três anos sucessivos
de abandonos e regressos, talvez já não
molhando a tela com água da torneira e
expondo-a aos elementos físicos, e depois
raspando, pintando de novo, voltando a raspar.
E nada separa estes dois quadros do
terror quase melancólico de um outro
óleo de 1888, A Velha Igreja de Aker, com as
casas fechadas e a impossibilidade de
encontro e diálogo marcada pelo ocre das
empenas e por um céu iluminado pela
sua própria sombra. Em Abril de 1998, à
mesa do Olsen, o engenheiro do Instituto de
Hidráulica de Copenhaga recupera da infância o
som das botas dos nazis pisando as ervas
do quintal de casa de seus pais, onde
Munch, por esse tempo, passara um fim de
semana regressando de Asgardstrand,
e afirma que O Grito (1893, têmpera
e pastel sobre madeira) é já o retrato
do século XX. E que todos estes quadros são
o mesmo quadro. E que Munch haveria
necessariamente de morrer numa Noruega
ocupada pelo ódio, retirado na sua
quinta de Ekelay, para que a Arte fosse,
acima da técnica e do estilo, uma ciência
semelhante à História, mas que relata os
factos de um futuro que por
antecipação é possível aprender
nos seus traços essenciais.

José Carlos Barros, O Uso dos Venenos.

Splits in the skin

Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal because there's not enough material.

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night.

All together now

O slogan dirige-se aos espíritos simples: por isso é que a educação moderna tende a simplificar os espíritos, a infantilizá-los, a detê-los numa etapa primária do seu desenvolvimento normal. Como há-de chegar o dia – e não creio que falte muito – em que a sabedoria dos homens consista em litanias de slogans, tal como a sua comida em pílulas e sínteses, convém ir adaptando a inteligência e o estômago. Estão na forja os instrumentos de uma gigantesca lavagem ao cérebro colectiva. A unanimidade pré-fabricada é uma das ameaças mais verosímeis da humanidade.

Gonzalo Torrente Ballester numa crónica de 1964 (in Memória de um Inconformista).

Guardador de margens

Vincent van Gogh, The Kingfisher, 1886.

World Happiness

Perhaps the most striking finding of the whole report is that a ranking of countries according to the happiness of their immigrant populations is almost exactly the same as for the rest of the population. The immigrant happiness rankings are based on the full span of Gallup data from 2005 to 2017, sufficient to have 117 countries with more than 100 immigrant respondents.

The ten happiest countries in the overall rankings also ll ten of the top eleven spots in the ranking of immigrant happiness. Finland is at the top of both rankings in this report, with the happiest immigrants, and the happiest population in general.

The closeness of the two rankings shows that the happiness of immigrants depends predominantly on the quality of life where they now live, illustrating a general pattern of convergence. Happiness can change, and does change, according to the quality of the society in which people live. Immigrant happiness, like that of the locally born, depends on a range of features of the social fabric, extending far beyond the higher incomes traditionally thought to inspire and reward migration. The countries with the happiest immigrants are not the richest countries, but instead the countries with a more balanced set of social and institutional supports for better lives.

While convergence to local happiness levels is quite rapid, it is not complete, as there is a ‘footprint’ effect based on the happiness in each source country. This effect ranges from 10% to 25%. This footprint effect, explains why immigrant happiness is less than that of the locals in the happiest countries, while being greater in the least happy countries.

O relatório está aqui.

Rima forte

This perusal of the paper always ends in the same way with her reading out the Deaths and In Memoriams. The In Memoriams are always chosen from a big ledger in the Evening Post offices on Commercial Street in Leeds and adapted, not always successfully to the requirements of the deceased, my favourite (which isn’t apocryphal) ending up:

Down the lanes of memory
The lights are never dim.
Until the stars forget to shine
We shall remember her.

Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On.

Domingo no mundo (51)

Forty years ago, John Berger called the zoo “an epitaph to a relationship” between people and animals. Today those words could be applied to much of middle-class mass culture: it has become a kind of memorial to the nonhuman world, revived in a thousand representations even as it disappears all at once.

Human isolation from nonhuman nature, from Shanghai to Mumbai to Phoenix, goes beyond extermination and segregation. Even what we do encounter outside ourselves lacks the power Hannah Arendt called action: to begin something new, to set events in motion. The scripts of pets are closely edited for safety, hygiene, conformity to stereotype. Industrial agriculture has achieved totalitarian control over the beasts it turns to meals. No predator starts trouble with us.

Jedediah Purdy, Thinking Like a Mountain.

Pay attention

We’re taught early that attention is a currency—we “pay” attention—and much of the discipline of the classroom is aimed at marshaling the attention of children, with very mixed results. We all have a history here, of how we did or did not learn to pay attention and all the praise or blame that came with that. It used to be that such patterns of childhood experience faded into irrelevance. As we reached adulthood, how we paid attention, and to what, was a personal matter and akin to breathing—as if it were automatic.  

Today, though, as we grapple with a pervasive new digital culture, attention has become an issue of pressing social concern. Technology provides us with new tools to grab people’s attention. These innovations are dismantling traditional boundaries of private and public, home and office, work and leisure. Emails and tweets can reach us almost anywhere, anytime. There are no cracks left in which the mind can idle, rest, and recuperate. A taxi ad offers free wifi so that you can remain “productive” on a cab journey. 

Even those spare moments of time in our day—waiting for a bus, standing in a queue at the supermarket—can now be “harvested,” says the writer Tim Wu in his book The Attention Merchants. In this quest to pursue “those slivers of our unharvested awareness,” digital technology has provided consumer capitalism with its most powerful tools yet. And our attention fuels it. As Matthew Crawford notes in The World Beyond Your Head, “when some people treat the minds of other people as a resource, this is not ‘creating wealth,’ it is transferring it.”

Madeleine Bunting, Disarming the weapons of mass distraction. 

1989

Vida: modo de usar

In September 1921 T.S. Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown. The causes were numerous: anxiety over the mental health of his wife Vivien; delay in launching the Criterion, whose first issue did not appear until a year later; concern for the postwar state of the nation, with its two million unemployed; and concern for the state of the long poem he had planned, which should have been finished months before yet still refused to take shape. But the event that triggered his collapse was a visit that summer from his mother, whom he hadn’t seen for six years. 

Eliot’s austere New England parents had disapproved of his marriage in 1915 and of his decision to remain and work in England after completing his doctoral thesis. Charlotte’s visit to London, though eagerly anticipated by her son, promised to be difficult: ‘another anxiety and a joy’ as he put it in a letter to his friend and patron John Quinn. His mother’s health was frail, Vivien’s was unpredictable, and moreover he felt the need to justify his new life. 

Charlotte turned up with his sister Marian and older brother Henry. Her visit appears to have gone smoothly, though the fact of her presence may have been reproach enough. Shortly after her departure he collapsed. 

David Seabrook, All the Devils are Here, excerto do excerto da Granta.

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)

Não há melhor homenagem do que esta.

Jovem

Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Retrato de uma jovem, 1850 ou 1859*

* Pode ser um zero, pode ser um nove: se Jean-Baptiste estivesse aqui diria, surpreendido, «Então não se vê logo que é um zero?» ou «Então não se vê logo que é um nove?»

Faz atenção, Alan

‘Books Do Furnish a Room’, wrote Anthony Powell, but my mother never thought so and she’d always put them out of the way in the sideboard when you weren’t looking. Books untidy, books upset, more her view. Though once a keen reader herself, particularly when she was younger, she always thought of library books as grubby and with a potential for infection – not intellectual infection either. Lurking among the municipally owned pages might be the germs of TB or scarlet fever, so one must never be seen to peer at a library book too closely or lick your finger before turning over still less read such a book in bed.

Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On.

Domingo no mundo (50)

Jean-Étienne Liotard, Natureza-morta: conjunto de chá, 1781-3.

O jogo

[...] I can’t write with impunity. When I try to get in the reader’s head, I destabilize myself, too.

Julián Herbert numa entrevista à Paris Review.

As fotografias do menino Coetzee

In 2014, years after he moved from South Africa to Australia, the novelist J.M. Coetzee finally sold his own apartment in Cape Town. Soon after a researcher went through a cardboard box left behind in the vacated flat — and inside, to his astonishment, he discovered a welter of remarkable unpublished materials by the taciturn Nobel laureate. But they were not manuscripts. They were photographs: sheafs of yellowing prints that depicted “scenes from provincial life,” as his three volumes of autobiography are subtitled, as well as undeveloped negatives.

Tudo aqui.

Dia de pensar a mulher

(...) the key to understanding Mège’s work is “the act itself... an act that makes her into an artist of some sort.” He was interested in the fact that, while Mège appears to have the will of an artist, she distributes the means of creation to others; she is an artist whose medium is other artists. He invented new words to describe her work: “It’s a selfothermade,” he wrote, “not an auto-portrait... but it’s not a simple alloportrait either.”

Anna Heyward, The Opposite of a Muse.

Espertismo

11 September [2015]. David Cameron has been in Leeds preaching to businessmen the virtues of what he calls ‘the smart state’. This seems to be a state that gets away with doing as little as possible for its citizens and shuffling as many responsibilities as it can onto anyone who thinks they can make a profit out of them. I am glad there wasn’t a smart state when I was being brought up in Leeds, a state that was unsmart enough to see me and others like me educated free of charge and sent on at the city’s expense to university, provided with splendid libraries, cheap transport and a terrific art gallery, not, of course to mention the city’s hospitals.

Smart to Mr Cameron seems to mean doing as little as one can get away with and calling it enterprise. Smart as in smart alec, smart of the smart answer, which I’m sure Mr Cameron has to hand. Dead smart.

Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On.

Só dois dedinhos

Isaac Israels, No Café, 1905.

There’s always crap to get rid of, more than you can clear

He quotes the novelist Mary McCarthy, who was still writing venomous book reviews well into her dotage and who, when asked why she continued to be so ferociously unappeased, said, “there is so much to hate”.

James Wood nesta entrevista.

É mais ou menos isso

Quando escreve, você contempla a emoção, já não está mais emocionado. Você ainda se emociona, mas não está dentro daquela emoção que teria, vamos supor, no ato amoroso ou no fervor da ideia. Você está afastado com grande emoção, mas acima da emoção, como se estivesse só observando o seu próprio estar emocionado. É mais ou menos isso.

Hilda Hilst, Fico Besta Quando Me Entendem.

Domingo no mundo (49)

John Singer Sargent, Retrato de Lady Agnew Lochnaw, 1892.

O uso da casa

No uso da casa precisamos tanto de zonas com luz muito forte como de penumbra, de descanso, sossego, tranquilidade, etc. Esse doseamento da luz é importantíssimo.  

Souto Moura em conversa com Siza Vieira no Ípsilon de ontem.

Um mal-entendido sobre a emigração

O problema não é substituir os livros por um ecrã de um telefone inteligente ou de um tablet — o problema é o mito perigoso de que a “leitura”, mesmo numa forma diferente, está a emigrar de um meio para outro, porque não está. O que se está é a ler diferente, pior e menos, como se está a “saber” demasiado lixo — meia dúzia de performances rudimentares com as novas tecnologias — e pouco saber. A morte das livrarias é um aspecto desse soçobrar no lixo, mas infelizmente estão demasiado acompanhadas pela morte de muitas outras coisas, do valor do conhecimento, do silêncio, do tempo lento, da leitura, da verdade factual, e da usura da democracia.

J. Pacheco Pereira, O combate civilizacional pelos livros e pela leitura.

Se não são as pessoas, são os ursos

Even having a swath of land, I quarrel with the neighbor. He’s suing me. It’s just like having a guy in the apartment next door. He’s got his 120 acres, and I’ve got mine, it doesn’t matter. In New York it would be 120 square feet, but it’s the same damn story. You just can’t avoid it. People are everywhere.
[...]
If it’s not people — I had a place in the Yukon, 50 miles from the nearest human — and a freaking grizzly bear started marauding. And whenever I wasn’t there he’d tear the place up.
[...]
Basically, when life decides it’s going to visit you, it will visit you. You can’t hide.

Denis Johnson numa entrevista.

Fotografia de trazer na carteira

Man Ray: Paul e Nusch Éluard, 1936.

Já vai? Ora, beba mais uma chávena de chá

An editorial in The Irish Times in 2014 exhorting Ireland to introduce philosophy to secondary schools argues against ‘attempts to remove time for reflection’, perfectly summed up by ‘the slogans of our techno-consumerist age’ – Just do it, Move fast and break things, YOLO (You only live once) – which encourage us to ‘act now, think later’. Against a ‘consumer society [that] constantly attempts to remove time for reflection’, philosophy is recommended as ‘a counterbalance to this culture of fast action’.

The problem with ‘fast action’ is that it presumes a sure way of doing things and a uniformity that, in a pinch, we can accelerate. Just as fast food works for some meals and not for others, we must remain open to things that take time, both for preserving what is of value from the past and taking the time to forge new approaches in the present. The key here is multiplicity, plurality and diversity, which take time.

Vincenzo Di Nicola, Slow Thought: a manifesto.

Retrato da senhora

William Eggleston, Eudora Welty, 1988.