Translating Portuguese into English is a task of destroying syntactic resources. The reverse operation, almost always an expressive annihilation. English into Portuguese is often terrible, and the opposite is more often than not dull. I began these notes willing to translate into English whatever I wrote: it did not take long for me to give up the enterprise and deliberate, on the contrary, not to translate anything, except these notes. We are now two years and tens of thousands of words translated, when this time would be better spent writing more lines in Portuguese. I wonder how much frustration and waste of time I would have faced had I followed the initial plan and translated the other books I published… Glory to God! Hence the doubt: do I avoid this veiled obligation or do I carry to the end what I have started?
Category: Notes
The Mind, If Not Controlled, Withers Away
The mind, if not controlled, withers away. To control it, the very difficult and continuous effort to discard the natural and irrepressible impulses. If the effort yields, the will establishes its dictatorship, in which reason is muzzled. The mind has its strength and freedom tied to a set of habits that it itself is responsible for dictating: if it refuses the task, it condemns itself to prostration.
Reticences…
No matter how great my respect for the author or how high the elevation of spirit that a dissertation produces in me, I never experience the feeling that I am facing the revelation of a truth. Is it a vice? An exaggerated and counterproductive skepticism? Or a perceptive limitation? It is true that the study of metaphysics takes the mind to a much more interesting plane than the plane of the so-called sensible reality; but what good is it, for a mind incapable of accepting formulas and opposed to affirmation? Reticences…
A List of Next Readings Only Grows
No matter how much one reads, a list of next readings only grows, always grows, until it becomes an indomitable monster and demands, as humanly unfeasible, a new planning, from the ground, through a new list. It is always the same, and the process is inevitable. If, on the one hand, the planning of studies is fundamental, on the other hand, its full compliance is impractical, or rather, inconvenient. This is because, in the course of the process, interest expands to other paths, and nothing is more fruitful for intellectual growth than following the course of one’s own interest. The old next readings, let them be for another occasion… In short: reading lists are important guidelines designed to be disregarded and discarded. And that is just as well.