When I imagine Cioran’s posture in front of a piece of paper and compare it with that of some of the best-selling artisans of entertainment, I think that every book should have a colored label attached to the cover indicating whether the work is serious or whether it is fun, a pastime, a joke—perhaps a happy face would fulfill the role well for these. Sincerity has an aggressive potential that marketing should avoid at all cost. Who pays to be attacked? Certainly not the mainstream audience. Moreover, the classification would be useful for the reader to know from whom he could ask any satisfaction, from whom he would be seen as a customer and, therefore, who would be truly interested in his satisfaction. It would be useful and very easy to identify who publishes for fame and who scratches the paper realizing they are bleeding.
Category: Notes
Affliction and Revolt
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…
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.”