Arquivo de Notes | Page 329 of 334

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?

____________

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.

____________

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.

____________

História de Dom Pedro II, by Heitor Lyra [2]

I said a few words yesterday about this book; insufficient, though. I emphasized my respect for the author, but I forgot the protagonist. I redeem myself on this note: Dom Pedro II is the greatest example of honor and prudence in the history of Brazil. He ruled for more than half a century, always being an icon of tolerance and detachment from power; Brazil was able, thanks to his temperament, to make an exchange of regime peacefully — how many countries can say the same? — and in return, he was expelled from the country as a thief, condemned to exile and sorrow, spending his last days in a bleak solitude. When he died, lonely, having a sachet with sand from Copacabana in his pocket, the military, led by abject Floriano Peixoto, denied him even a diplomatic representation at the funeral, which was monumental, but paid by France, gratefully, between other things, for being Dom Pedro II the first statesman to visit the country after devastated by the Franco-Prussian War. The poignant of the whole story is that the “grandson of Marcus Aurelius”, as Victor Hugo referred to him, resigned stoically in being the target of cruel injustice, believing the story would reward him. Today, we well know, the memory of Dom Pedro II is non-existent; our students learn only half a note about his life and his character. And there is one of the beautiful ironies of history, very well represented by the fire of the Museu Nacional: being the museum, the character; and the fire, the reward.

____________