Although it is very interesting to note similarities in the approach of different traditions of thought to the central problem of human experience, and although they can effectively stimulate the awakening of consciousness, it would not be wrong to say that all the books ever written are insufficient for the individual to complete himself on this earth, that is, they are useless unless they stimulate action. This is why this problem, which has already produced endless lines, will always remain unsolved at the individual level, regardless of the quality of the manual used. The spirit that awakens, or rather the awakening, can be summed up in the realization that there is a work to be done, a personal and non-transferable work, without which existence itself seems meaningless. So there are many roads that lead to what is perhaps the capital moment of a life, but the paths are useless, if not justified by the act of walking on them.
The Psychological Mechanism That Is the Precursor…
The psychological mechanism that is the precursor of disillusionment is one of the most interesting mental faculties ever known. It manifests itself as a need, a natural unconscious tendency to project idealizations onto real entities and situations. In the minds that experience it, all conscious mental activity seems prone to detach itself from the concrete and spontaneously blend with subjective and fanciful tones, creating a parallel reality in which experience is intensified and presented in ideal aspect. Freud, of course, classified what little he understood of this mechanism as mental illness. But if, on the one hand, it contributes to accentuate, if not to produce future unpleasant contrasts between expectation and reality, it should be noted that creativity is entirely dependent on this capacity to attribute fantastic qualities to concrete experience. From the poet who idealizes the beloved woman to the engineer who creates in his mind the impossible, all of them have their inventiveness, and therefore their distinctiveness, originating in this very same mental faculty.
Latin Syntactic Flexibility
The student who is resistant enough to overcome the terrible difficulties Latin presents will be rewarded with unlimited access to the true beauty of Latin syntactic flexibility, so intricate to the brain educated in modern Romance languages. This is one of the most notable distinguishing features of Portuguese as compared to other modern languages, making them seem harsh and prosaic. To appreciate the syntactic variety of the Latin constructions is, in fact, to appreciate the degree of creativity with which the author articulates the discourse, variegating and surprising. Without a doubt, it is a pleasure that justifies years of effort to learn Latin.
There Is No Doubt That It Was and Has Been Deleterious…
There is no doubt that the simultaneous movement by the intelligentsia towards the English language and away from Latin and French was and has been deleterious to the Portuguese language. The fact is obvious and it happened less by choice than by necessity. However, today it is possible to see how much was lost. If we reflect on the vehement condemnation made by grammarians of yesteryear regarding the Gallicisms that invaded the Portuguese language, we get the false impression that French was contaminating the vernacular, when, in fact, it had a mostly enriching effect, as can be seen in perhaps the greatest prose writers of the language: Eça, Camilo and Machado. The French influence, then, now non-existent, did more to confer beauty to the Portuguese discourse. As for Latin, driven out of schools and universities, the lament is even greater. There is no need to list what the Portuguese speaker loses by giving up the study of Latin, since many have already done so uselessly, such as Napoleão Mendes de Almeida. The fact is that the average intellectual today is formed with not only vernacular but also cognitive deficiencies: he reasons worse due to difficulty in articulating reasoning, due to an inability to order discourse—something that could be prevented by studying Latin. And if we turn to the aesthetic loss, so considering that English is the substitute for Latin, the situation is even more pitiable. What to do?