Um viver em comum

A transmissão de conhecimento não é uma simples comunicação de conteúdos, é um exercício de pensamento. Daí a insubstituibilidade e responsabilidade do professor: insubstituibilidade, porque não há ensino sem uma relação de escuta e atenção em que os dizeres suspendem os objectivos imediatos da vida, a pressão da subsistência. Lembre-se que a palavra grega de que deriva "escola" (skholê) significava uma suspensão das actividades utilitárias (um lazer), bem como um modo específico de organização do viver em comum.

Silvina Rodrigues Lopes, "Do ensino como um ofício inquieto". 

O modo como vivemos

O modo como vivemos já é política, até se o modo como vivemos forem dois velhos num estúdio, sozinhos e despenteados, surdos, enquanto a selva da cidade, através dos vidros, os tenta aniquilar.

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida e Humberto Brito, Regras de isolamento.

A vida de Dorothy

A life made, or half-made, under conditions of academic precarity is often a paranoid, anxious, stupefying life - stupefying in part because, in some sense, you chose it. As any director of graduate studies will remind you, no one forced you to go to graduate school. You went because you thought, like Strong's narrator, that books were the answer to life's problems. Or maybe because, like Dorothy, you thought you might become the kind of "scholar who taught in at a top-tier research university and wrote books for the general reader that would be reviewed in the daily paper." For whatever reason, you chose a less remunerative (and possibly less evil) path than your peers who went into management consulting or tech. What you did not choose, at least not knowingly, was a life of permanent gig work and near-poverty wages.

Vale a pena ler o artigo na íntegra, aqui.

But she learned better

Milly is fat and ugly but she gives good head so she rarely sleeps alone, which is not to say she’s not lonely. Milly is not, in fact, ugly, but she might as well be. She has a pretty face, which is the same thing as ugly when a woman is fat. In the complex calculus between men and women, Milly understands that fat is always ugly and that ugly and skinny makes a woman eminently more desirable than fat and any combination such as beautiful, charming, intelligent, or kind. Milly is all those things. She knows it doesn’t matter. The truth of things makes Milly angry but she is quiet about it, her anger. She keeps it to herself, knows it sits at the bottom of her chest growing and growing, but there’s not much she can do about it. She knows how difficult it is to change the world. She used to try, to change the world, but she learned better.

Roxanne Gay, Difficult Women. 

Tempos de sombra

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

H. P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu.

25 de Março de 1925

Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.

Domingo no mundo (118)

(...) penso na minha tarde. Penso que poderei sentar-me a escrever sem que nada me moleste ou incomode. Grande coisa é o domingo visto daqui com a sua tarde intocada e as suas horas generosas longe do mundo. Tão longe do mundo.

Ivone Mendes da Silva, O Fulgor Instável das Magnólias.

Domingo no mundo (118)

Os esquecidos, as anónimas

(...) De alguna forma misteriosa y espontánea, el amor por los libros forjó una cadena invisible de gente - hombres y mujeres - que, sin conocerse, ha salvado el tesoro de los mejores relatos, sueños y pensamientos a lo largo del tiempo.                                                            Esta es la historia de una novela coral aún por escribir. El relato de una fabulosa aventura colectiva, la pasión callada de tantos seres humanos unidos por esta misteriosa lealtad: narradoras orales, inventores, escribas, iluminadores, bibliotecarias, traductores, libreras, vendedores ambulantes, maestras, sabios, espías, rebeldes, viajeros, monjas, esclavos, aventureras, impresores. Lectores en sus clubs, en sus casas, en cumbres de montaña, junto al mar que ruge, en las capitales donde la energía se concentra y en los enclaves apartados donde el saber se refugia en tiempos de caos. Gente común cuyos nombres en muchos casos non registra la historia. Los olvidados, las anónimas. Personas que lucharon por nosotros, por los rostros nebulosos del futuro.

Iréne Vallejo, El infinito en un junco.

O tempo e o espaço

O que ganhamos e o que perdemos, o irreversível, por Maria Filomena Molder.

Domingo no mundo (117)

Sempé, J'ai mal partout, s/d.

 

Domingo no mundo (116)

9 am, Sempé para a New Yorker (# 2976 - Vol. 58 - N.° 2), Março de 1982.