Domingo no mundo (114)

Vincenzo Foppa, O jovem Cícero a ler, c.1464

What consolation can there be for the awareness that everything we love is dying?

Beauty itself is not always a consolation. For it is inseparable from transitoriness. Be it the beauty of a girl, or a boy, or a flower, or a song. It must end and soon, if it is to be perceived by earthlings as beautiful. A flower that doesn't fade is hideous. A song that runs through our mind for an hour, let alone a day or a week, bores and irritates us and finally disgusts us. Beauty gives us pleasure. The keenest pleasure, if prolonged, must turn into pain. A toothache can last for a week, or a month, and seem only to grow sharper for its long duration. But there is no point in studying to prolong orgasm. For a orgasm prolonged for as much as an hour would have long ceased to be a pleasure. Human beings are geared for pain. Pain is what we are good at. If a thing of beauty is to be a joy forever, it's because we have the power to recall it when it is gone, drawing it into our imagination where it shines all the brighter with the surrounding shadow of bereavement. Death and annihilation are necessary conditions for the existence of beauty. Every poet who ever wrote has known that joy's hand is forever "at his lips. / Bidding adieu", as Keats said. No poet was more achingly aware of beauty than Keats, who was ill and dying all his short life. What consolation can there be for the awareness that everything we love is dying?

Transcrição minha da introdução a este episódio, um dos meus predilectos até ao momento, desta série. 

O futuro próximo

This, then, is what passes for optimism in these grim times: the hope that while the days are still warm, and after tens if not hundreds of thousands of lives have been lost that could have been saved with quicker action, some of us will be able to start crawling out into the sunlight. We’ll emerge into a world in which people give each other wide berths and suspicious looks, where those public venues still in business allow only the thinnest crowds to congregate, and where a system of legal segregation determines who can enter them. Millions will still be out of work and struggling to get by, and people will watch nervously for signs of a new flare-up near them. 

Qualquer semelhança com Orwell, Le Guin e Atwood é mera coincidência. Ide ler.

Domingo no mundo (113)

Édouard Vuillard, Intérieur ensoleillé, 1920.