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