I have never written a line in English, among the hundreds of thousands that have come out of my head, that was not a translation of a thought conceived in Portuguese. Not even in an email. And to imagine the battle fought by so many writers of the last century, who voluntarily adopted a new language to create literature… A writer for whom language is limited to a vehicle of expression is inconceivable. Language is ingrained in thought itself, which is constructed through it. The logical structure of thought is based only on the syntactic structure of the language in which it is shaped; the two are inseparable, and the former cannot flourish without the latter. Words in different languages follow one another and are organized in different ways; this is evidence not of a formal difference, but of a distinction between the genius of the men who develop them. Changing it, when one is already old, seems like a shock of tremendous proportions.
He Who Wants to Teach…
He who has something to teach and wants to teach needs to understand that, in order to make his desire a reality, there must also be someone who wants to learn. This is a fact: the best teacher is not able to overcome some of the barriers that a bad student can put up; a good student, on the other hand, is able to learn something even from the worst teacher. From this we can see that learning, in short, depends more on the student than on the teacher, who is limited to facilitating or hindering learning, stimulating or discouraging. This is the case no matter how great the teacher’s will or knowledge.
An Irrefutable Logical Exposition
Something inexplicably funny happens when we come across a crystal-clear, perfect and irrefutable logical exposition that does not exert on the listeners the same brilliance and charm that radiates from the expositor’s words. Thomas Aquinas comes to mind… What can be said? Unfortunately, logic can only impress those accustomed to practicing it or, at the very least, those capable of understanding it. The work of Thomas Aquinas is an impossible feat. The proofs he presents, for example, on the necessity of God’s existence, could not be better or more logically formulated, nor more clearly explained by a human head whose expressive instrument is language. And yet they are useless, absolutely useless and hollow to most mortals.
The Antithesis of Dominant Thought
It really is an impressive phenomenon that the antithesis of dominant thought always emerges, precisely when it believes itself to be sovereign, and ends up being surprised with a violence proportional to the effort made to consolidate it. In the same way, genius emerges when the environment seems to make it impossible. And when we see that, after a few decades, the impossible happens and the tiny overtakes the enormous, we wonder at these frequent coincidences…