The exceptional thing about this world is that the appearance of monotony is mixed with visible and radical transformations. The impossibility of the absolute, while evident, is camouflaged by the false moroseness of time. Perception is always caught in a dilemma: unable to formulate reasonable projections, unable to accurately interpret reality, it still lacks judgment and chooses error. Everything in motion, everything susceptible to sudden and untimely blows: health just a step away from illness, lack from abundance, apathy from agitation. And the future, alien to logic, never ceasing to give way to contingency.
Category: Notes
Gratitude Is a Noble Exercise
I remember the day I decided to start these notes. Like all important decisions, this one came to me like a gust, seizing my mind and forcing immediate action. In the next instant, the thought of what to write. The consensus: start with the acknowledgments. So I wrote about Nelson, Dostoevsky, Swift, Pondé and a few others, and it was not a week from the decision to the publication of the first notes. Fair enough. To the initiate, I see no reasonable posture other than that of humility; it is necessary to be accountable to those who contributed in some way to his initiation. Gratitude is a noble and profitable exercise, recognition is a requirement of character. I say this to conclude: the faculty of gratitude seems to me a good parameter to distinguish the one who, by voluntary effort, strives to be greater than his vanity.
The Ultimate Utopia Is Stability
The ultimate utopia is stability—and a gross error to seek it in a world that is essentially unstable. In a reality of continuous and compulsory movement, even fear loses its justifiable character: the word is adaptation.
Carl Jung’s Acuity
It is incredible to note the acuity of some of Jung’s observations when applied to general conduct and its natural reflexes in a society. When we perceive that there is a search for external validation operating incessantly and encompassing even strictly individual acts, we understand why there is such a high degree of submission to the environment—this one, considered en masse as the sovereign arbiter. From this to the public demand for conduct against one’s will, even if disguised, under penalty of jail or lynching, does not take much time. And the reflexes? How predictable! The social man has no personality; he is a puppet of the collective behavior. All it takes is for one imbecile to get up on a stage, convince a claque, and then the endless mass of sheep, out of fear and need, will be embracing him.