The psychological mechanism that is the precursor of disillusionment is one of the most interesting mental faculties ever known. It manifests itself as a need, a natural unconscious tendency to project idealizations onto real entities and situations. In the minds that experience it, all conscious mental activity seems prone to detach itself from the concrete and spontaneously blend with subjective and fanciful tones, creating a parallel reality in which experience is intensified and presented in ideal aspect. Freud, of course, classified what little he understood of this mechanism as mental illness. But if, on the one hand, it contributes to accentuate, if not to produce future unpleasant contrasts between expectation and reality, it should be noted that creativity is entirely dependent on this capacity to attribute fantastic qualities to concrete experience. From the poet who idealizes the beloved woman to the engineer who creates in his mind the impossible, all of them have their inventiveness, and therefore their distinctiveness, originating in this very same mental faculty.
Category: Notes
Latin Syntactic Flexibility
The student who is resistant enough to overcome the terrible difficulties Latin presents will be rewarded with unlimited access to the true beauty of Latin syntactic flexibility, so intricate to the brain educated in modern Romance languages. This is one of the most notable distinguishing features of Portuguese as compared to other modern languages, making them seem harsh and prosaic. To appreciate the syntactic variety of the Latin constructions is, in fact, to appreciate the degree of creativity with which the author articulates the discourse, variegating and surprising. Without a doubt, it is a pleasure that justifies years of effort to learn Latin.
There Is No Doubt That It Was and Has Been Deleterious…
There is no doubt that the simultaneous movement by the intelligentsia towards the English language and away from Latin and French was and has been deleterious to the Portuguese language. The fact is obvious and it happened less by choice than by necessity. However, today it is possible to see how much was lost. If we reflect on the vehement condemnation made by grammarians of yesteryear regarding the Gallicisms that invaded the Portuguese language, we get the false impression that French was contaminating the vernacular, when, in fact, it had a mostly enriching effect, as can be seen in perhaps the greatest prose writers of the language: Eça, Camilo and Machado. The French influence, then, now non-existent, did more to confer beauty to the Portuguese discourse. As for Latin, driven out of schools and universities, the lament is even greater. There is no need to list what the Portuguese speaker loses by giving up the study of Latin, since many have already done so uselessly, such as Napoleão Mendes de Almeida. The fact is that the average intellectual today is formed with not only vernacular but also cognitive deficiencies: he reasons worse due to difficulty in articulating reasoning, due to an inability to order discourse—something that could be prevented by studying Latin. And if we turn to the aesthetic loss, so considering that English is the substitute for Latin, the situation is even more pitiable. What to do?
At Some Point in History, the Press Discovered…
At some point in history, the press discovered that it could sell truths—and how much it could profit from doing so. Then, realizing this new potentiality, it took it on with gusto and, over decades, gradually intensifying it as intensifying it proved more and more profitable, it became a tool of systematic manipulation. For a while, nothing seemed able to stand up to it, to diminish its sovereign power; and it deluded itself that it would always be like this. What has happened in the West, then, in a sudden way and notably in Brazil, is something simply delightful to observe: this whole scoundrel empire, this conglomerate of lies, is now targeted by the fury of the very masses it has manipulated and seems doomed to collapse. It is a privilege to notice it in real time! And who could have predicted it? After many years of lying, lying, and lying, to the point of doing it with an astonishing shamelessness, overstepping all limits and insulting the intelligence of those it deceived, it has fomented a very violent reaction against itself that did not warn when it would burst. It is true: it is still too early to risk the final chapters of this story; but, for now, there is no way to contain the stretching of the same smile that lived on Voltaire’s face.