Affliction and revolt: this is how the spirit seems to manifest when it contrasts the final feeling of not belonging with the obligatory need to belong to something. To detach oneself from the whole is an impossibility, even though the incompatible character of one’s nature is very clear—one must be an integral part, one must work for an impossible conciliation! And so, existing always seems to result in conflict, in open war that only stimulates negative feelings. Compulsory entry, exit only in weakness or submission. To stop talking is easy before closing the eyes, taming the veins, and annulling the bursts of the mind…
Category: Notes
Renounces and Apostasies
Curious to note the posture of those whom I might call my prose models. Nietzsche, over the years, disowned his master with unparalleled violence. Cioran, though alternating outbursts and laments, did similarly with the one who he referred to as his “model.” It seems a natural course of life to slowly shed the old precepts, the old admirations, and what once shaped and nourished an expanding spirit. Cioran said in life only breakups matter. Perhaps because breakups are usually acts of courage. Renounces, apostasies, gradual and definitive detachment: all this seems, if looked at from a distance, to contribute to a kind of liberation.
Easy Money!
Forced by circumstances, I go after some translation jobs: freedom as to workload, reasonable return… I fill out my resume: vast experience in the industry, knowledge of several languages, etc., etc. They send me as a test, from the land of Shakespeare, the manual of a stupidly modest portable air conditioner. I look at it and almost laugh. From English to Portuguese it is a piece of cake! I have been translating a thousand words a week for years… And what about the domestic machine? I have a diploma that allows me to design boilers, pressure vessels, loading lifts, industrial ovens, stoves, combustion engines, cranes… and I already know that it will not take me fifteen minutes to pour out the extremely banal five hundred words and guarantee my new source of income. I read Shakespeare, Blake, Walt Whitman… Easy money! And then I get to work; in thirty minutes, the result is ready and revised. I send it by email to the contracting company. The next day, the answer: translation rejected! “We are so sorry, sir. You did not pass the test this time.”
Forced by Circumstances
It is amazing how torture it is to feel forced by circumstances to apply one’s own effort to something that delivers nothing more than money. To apply one’s own effort, and almost always the bulk of one’s own time… I see the average artist in despair before the seemingly insoluble question: how not to be useful to other human beings, or at least, how not to be outrageously useful, strictly useful, and still survive? How not sum up one’s own life in a creeping utilitarianism? How to be an artist, and not a commercial manager, a designer, a salesman? How to be an artist and, at the very least, abstain from any financial necessity in the production of one’s own work? It seems that the supreme merit boils down to being lucky…