Arquivo de Notes | Page 263 of 264

Amy Winehouse

I imagine myself after a year married with Amy Winehouse. Any kind of physical contact would already be impossible; there would be, among us, a poignant and total disgust. There would be no dialogue; clearly, we would not even have character affinity. If any passion had preceded marriage, then it would now be properly buried, cooled by time and temper discrepancies. With absolute certainty, I would be already being betrayed uncovered. And then I imagine myself, in the next room, listening to her daily rehearsing. I wouldn’t ask for a divorce.

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The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe

I read Werther for the first time and — quote! — I didn’t like it. I came from I do not know what reading or, rather, from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and I felt the book being smaller than it is. And life, as usual, made my tongue burn. “Good, but mushy. At one point, it’s sick” — it’s what I’ve said at the end of the reading. I do not deny: I was in charm, drunk from the first contact with Mann. Shortly thereafter, I rethought: it’s very likely that the problem is in me, not in Goethe. I gave the book a new chance — a book, say, of “a sitting” — and the reading took place as follows: I felt chills, my eyes seemed to swallow the lines; sometimes I thought i’d pause, think calmly about everything I was feeling. Immersed in a whirlwind of feelings, thoughts, judging Werther while I was empathizing with the narrative. Almost crying, I close the book. The verdict: “Next to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich , these were the best few pages I’ve read in my entire life”. And I almost forget the main one: “I will never forgive myself for saying this book is sick. I am forever an idiot”.

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The Turnaround

I believe that the great turnaround in my relationship with the world occurred when I decided never, ever, in no case try to convince people to think in such or that way. This always includes avoiding issuing any opinion; if requested, send it carefully; if contested, accept without any spite. How good, anyway, not having attachment to ideas! And how pleasurable, socially, spit in the face of vanity valuing the good relations!

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How to Learn Languages

Some tricks that time taught me:

I- Establish a greater goal only possible if you know the language. Examples: learn English to read about finance, learn Spanish in order to emigrate, learn Latin to read classics in the original, learn Russian to read what has not yet been translated etc. etc.

II- From basic to intermediate: first, the ear; then speech; then reading; and finally: writing.

III- Learning a language is not a matter of intelligence, aptitude, nothing. Learning a language is insistence, it’s discipline. All you have to do is not to give up. It is a question that can be summed up in: how long can you persist in a text without understanding anything at all?

IV- At first, it is hard; shortly thereafter, progress begins to appear and continue to the intermediate level when contact with the literature begins. Here comes the most difficult, painful and discouraging part: understanding the texts seems impossible, vocabulary seems like an insurmountable wall, reading is not at all pleasurable and you have the feeling of wasting a lot of time in front of a text that will not deliver nothing. Well, it is precisely at this point that, persisting, one learns a language definitely.

V- Being versed in native language grammar contributes incalculably to learn any other language.

VI- I will repeat: teachers and courses are absolutely expendable. The self-taught is not the smart one, but one that resists amid discomfort.

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