Arquivo de Notes | Page 256 of 282

The Fate of the Intellectual

The intellectual must be unpredictable, or he will not be worthy of the epithet. If the reader, in contact with the title of a work or a chronicle, can predict its content, then the author will be dead, plunged into disinterest. I say the obvious, is to confront the examples… Single-subject chroniclers remain, novelists with blinkers are majority. And if they achieve, these or those, the desired effects ever, the insistence only exposes their limitations. The intellectual must be dynamic, varied, unpredictable and comprehensive; otherwise, he should stop speaking…

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The Distance Between the Audience and the Artist

Nothing represents the distance between the audience and the artist as well as the theater, and there is no great play immune to booing at first performance. Understandable fact, since the great dramatic effect is averse to pleasant. The playwright, therefore, can measure his own success by the negative reactions and, if he receives applause, perhaps he is a minor artist. So is dramaturgy. The stones show his strength and the natural thing is that flowers are not thrown but by an audience that has passed unscathed to him. Is that only in dramaturgy?…

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Style Is Abundance of Expressive Resources

The goal of every great artist should be to erect, in the long run, a complex and multifaceted monument. That is why minor artists are the ones who, annoyingly, only repeat the same processes. To do so, to seek emphasis on the same idea, the same impression or the evocation of the same feeling, is not, as some suppose, a demonstration of style, but evidence of a limited creative horizon. Style is expressiveness, power, conciseness, rhythm… Style is abundance of expressive resources, exactly the opposite of the artist’s capacity to repeat to exhaustion the same processes.

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The Great Human Problem Is Whether or Not There is Purpose

The great human problem is the problem of meaning, whether or not there is purpose. And it is not human life and work but the answer. This simple question surpasses all others, it goes through reality in the most intimate details. When all seems well, when fortune decides to show its whip, the problem remains evident, always waiting for an answer: for what? Thinking about it we have, therefore, the necessary tool to measure our dimension, to evaluate our existence and to decide, alone, what we should or should not do.

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