Arquivo de Notes | Page 259 of 264

About Self-Help Books

There are some things I find impossible, for example, Donald Trump dressed as Buddha at a carnival party. Another: an author of self-help with a Dostoevsky book in his hands. And not only Dostoevsky but Shakespeare too: writing self-help to someone who read Shakespeare is an absolute impossibility. I could continue extending the list of authors, but summary: the classics; no self-help author read the classics. And why is it so obvious? Because there is a total incompatibility between what is in the classics and what is found in self-help books. I reflect: there is an intellectual heritage transmitted through the centuries that must be respected and absorbed by someone who intends to teach lessons to others. If we still talk about Shakespeare, it is because there is something valuable, perennial, common to all mankind in Shakespeare. And I would even say that for someone who wants to know the human being at all or be minimally cultured, the classics are indispensable. I repeat, therefore, in my obsession: ten works, no more; I doubt that any self-help author has read ten works either between Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Could the author understand nothing? I do not think so. Could the author see easy money in self-help? Maybe… But I feel free to be bold and generalize: a self-help book is not intellectually relevant — I am sorry, but it is not.

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Solemnity While Praying

Why do evangelicals — there I go where I should not… — improvise prayers? I think and the conclusion is inevitable: Whenever, listening to an evangelical praying, the phrase withers, the word fails or the feeling is not expressed with power, I see the seriousness of prayer thrown to ridicule. I wonder if only I am repairing the mismatch of the unplanned phrase that, showing helpless, uses intonation to express itself and — excuse me of sincerity — should be ashamed. So much more beautiful is ready prayer, and more when silent. It must be some defect of discernment, but I see as clear the relationship between silence and reflection, silence and respect, silence and solemnity. And I am concerned with the unanswered question: why does the man of faith not follow God’s example and shut up?

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The Substance of These Lines

I throw these notes like I am smoking, and my pleasure is nothing but seeing them get lost in the air. To me, the grace to write seems to know the uselessness of words, knowing that they dissolve and fly. There is in art, however, something noble: the renunciation of life. Hitting the keyboard I abstain myself from the boredom of living, in genuine and utter disinterest. Life can not offer me nothing, and I hope nothing from it. I joke about the phrases, alternating the placement of words, thinking about images and laughing when talking to the computer. Beyond the window, the world proceeds as usual. But the world does not instill me but revulsion. I therefore take refuge here as in a cave, a retreat, where I find grace saying in silence, to no one, far from the unbearable rumor of life. I know I am building sand castles, but there is the substance that permeates these lines: disinterest.

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Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift

First, the specialist; then the amateur. Let’s see some of Otto Maria Carpeaux’s comments about the book and the author, in my translation:

Jonathan Swift — a humanist cleric, faithful-unfaithful to the Church of which he was a priest —is one of the greatest satirists of universal literature, perhaps the greatest of all. Gulliver’s Travels is the cruelest book there is. Lilliput’s warp and useless activities ridicule parliamentary life in 18th-century England and in all countries and times of constitutional and professional politics. Sketching this political landscape, Swift remembered his pamphleteer times in the service of the Conservative Party, the Tories; it’s a scathing satire against the Whigs. But soon after, Swift describes the patriarchal regime in the kingdom of Brobdingnag giants; and this is nothing better. On the contrary, the size of the giants grotesquely makes all the details enormous, that is, the infamy of the “conservative classes”. Nor are the intellectuals who, in the country of Laputa, vegetate as complete imbeciles. In the last part, the praise of the Houyhnhms, that is, the horses, nobler and smarter than men, is the absolute condemnation of the human race in totum. Finally, the episode of the Struldbrugs, which owe scientific progress to the immortality of life, not escaping, but to the diseases, weaknesses and senility of extreme old age, and who cannot die, already condemns life itself. The countless spirited and biting digressions — the description of the horrors of war as if they were the most natural things in the world, the mockery of Christian dogmas and rites, incredible in the mouth of a high dignitary of the Church — reveal in Swift the most radical representative rationalism in Illustration; not even Voltaire dared so much.

There are Carpeaux’s lucid words — and there are many more of them about Swift in História da Literatura Universal (vol. 2). — For my part, I say this: Gulliver’s Travels was perhaps the book that marked me the most. I always come back to it, reread excerpts, and have it throbbing in me. When I write and, for a moment, I think I am exaggerating in my judgments, I think of Swift. I remember Nelson Rodrigues once said that fiction, to purify, needs to be atrocious. According to this reasoning, few books purify as much as Gulliver’s Travels; and I share the trial. Swift’s “great soul, noble and wound” — still using Carpeaux’s words —can impregnate us with deep discomfort and revulsion towards our nature; however, no doubt, it ends up making us better people.

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