The choice

I have felt so many times that the choice of this era is to be destroyed or to morally compromise ourselves in order to be functional—to be wrecked, or to be functional for reasons that contribute to the wreck.

Jia Tolentino, Tricky Mirror. 

Oh as casas as casas as casas

"Grava para sempre a alegria na fachada da tua casa." Estava escrito mesmo abaixo das telhas, num prédio ao lado do nosso.

Lourdes Castro numa entrevista.

Cortesía con todo lo que fue.

También me doy cuenta en este instante de que en mi vida no han sucedido grandes cosas, y sin embargo llevo dentro de mí un hondo sufrimiento. El dolor no es en absoluto un impedimento para la alegría, tal como yo entiendo el dolor, pues para mí está vinculado a la intensificación de la conciencia. El sufrimiento es una conciencia expandida que alcanza a todas las cosas que han sido y serán. Es una especie de amabilidad secreta con todas las cosas. Cortesía con todo lo que fue. Y de la amabilidad y la cortesía nace siempre la elegancia.

Es una forma de conciencia general. El sufrimiento es una mano tendida. Es amabilidad hacia los otros. Mientras sonreímos, por dentro desfallecemos. Si elegimos sonreír en vez de caernos muertos en medio de la calle es por elegancia, por ternura, por cortesía, por amor a los otros, por respeto a los otros.

Manuel Vilas, Ordesa. 

O talento necessário

In 1890, when Manet’s Olympia was accepted by the French state after fundraising by the chief Impressionists, Morisot concluded that ‘we’ve come a long way from the stupid jokes of yesterday.’ And it had taken only twenty years for the first-generation Impressionists themselves to become classics, and to be collected as such: in 1894, the year before her death, the French state bought its first Morisot, Woman at a Ball (1879). But in some ways, Mme Morisot had not been wrong: despite the praise of peers and of critics, Berthe did not have a great deal of ‘commercial value’ or ‘public recognition’ (though her guarded nature would not have welcomed the latter). She showed at seven of the eight Impressionist Exhibitions, and Durand-Ruel offered her work in Boston, New York and London. She created about 860 paintings. Yet it seems she only sold between 25 and 40 of them – Zola, Alfred Stevens, Monet and Chausson were among the purchasers – and gave away around 25 more. By the time of her death, three-quarters of her output remained with her family. And when the French state came to describe her on her death certificate, it wrote: ‘no profession’.

Julian Barnes, The Necessary Talent, aqui.

Domingo no mundo (111)

Yann Rabanier, Tilda Swinton & John C. Reilly, 2011.

Domingo no mundo (110)

Florinne Stettheimer, Picnic at Bedford Hills, 1918.

And we have no more beginnings

Como dizia Jane Austen, estamos 24 horas por dia na vida.

Miguel Esteves Cardoso numa entrevista.

Domingo no mundo (109)

Éric Rhomer, Le genou de Claire, 1971.

Literatura e Tradução

How can literature help us here? The claim is often made that people who read literature are wiser or kinder, that literature inspires empathy. But is that true? I find that literature doesn’t really do those things. After observing the foreign policies of the so-called developed countries, I cannot trust any complacent claims about the power of literature to inspire empathy. Sometimes, even, it seems that the more libraries we have over here, the more likely we are to bomb people over there. 

What we can go to literature for is both larger and smaller than any cliché about how it makes us more empathetic. Literature does not stop the persecution of humans or the prosecution of humanitarians. It does not stop bombs. It does not, no matter how finely wrought, change the minds of the little fascists who once more threaten to overrun the West. So what is it good for—all this effort, this labor, this sweating over the right word, the correct translation? 

I offer this: literature can save a life. Just one life at a time. Perhaps at 4 AM when you get out of bed and pull a book of poetry from the shelf. Perhaps over a week in summer when you’re absorbed in a great novel. Something deeply personal happens there, something both tonic and sustaining. 

When I describe literature’s effect in these terms, I speak stubbornly in the singular. But I also know I am not alone in the world, and that none of us is. In a speech Albert Camus gave in Uppsala, Sweden, in 1957, he described the collective value of our seemingly disconnected lives: 

Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. 

And this ever-expanding power of a single life brings to mind a thought that has echoed through the ages. We find it for instance in a codex of the Mishnah written in Parma in the mid-thirteenth century: “Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.” Exactly the same thought is expressed in Surah Five of the Qur’an.  

Contrary to the general noise of the culture around us, writing has reminded me in some modest but essential way of things that people don’t want to be reminded of. Inside this modest thing called literature, I have found reminders to myself to negate frontiers and carry others across, and reminders of others who carry me, too. Imagine being in an emergency: a house on fire, a sinking boat, a court case, an endless trek, a changed planet. In such an emergency, you can no longer think only of yourself. You have to carry someone else, you have to be carried by someone else.

Teju Cole, aqui. 

O Tempo, corrida de estafetas

My father, George Isserlis, would have been 102 today. Curious to think that in a way he represents a link with musical history: he remembered meeting Josef Hoffmann, Josef Lhevinne, Medtner, etc — and, in a story I've told countless times, meeting someone who'd met Beethoven.

O violoncelista Steven Isserlis, no Twitter.

Mudar de ares

“At the beginning of the Sixties we had to go back to London, and not being able to find a house that we could afford, we settled for a boat; it was moored on Chelsea Reach, between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge, so that we were in one of the very grandest parts of London. On the other hand, we were living on an old wooden barge which for many years had carried cargoes [of coal] up and down the east coast under sail, but was now a battered, patched, caulked, tar-blackened hulk, heaving up with difficulty on every rising tide. Her name was Grace, and she had never been fitted with an engine, so that there was plenty of room for us in the huge belly of the hold. There was a very old stove, in which we burned driftwood. Driftwood will only light when it has paint or tar on it, and we knew its bitter fragrance well from the foreshore at Southwold, just as we were used to a more or less permanent state of damp and to the voices, at first light, of the seagulls.” 

Hermione Lee, Penelope Fitzgerald, Random House Inc.

The quit lit

“The Adjunct Underclass” belongs to what has, at this point, become a recognizable genre, popularly known as “quit lit.” (That name doesn’t capture the degree to which people feel that they are actually forced out of the profession.) Childress has a way of reinvigorating familiar tropes. He likens the adjunct professoriate to local auto mechanics crushed by national franchises, cab drivers forced to hustle against apps, journalists turned “content providers” trying to stay afloat in hyper-partisan times. He describes adjuncts as “shock absorbers” and compares their situation to the “invisibility of garment workers in Bangladesh.” They are like migrant laborers, who “watch the weather, hoping that the next growing season looks promising, and wondering whether it’s time to move along themselves.”

Sobre o que é estar na academia hoje, aqui.