Tag: history

There are no words to describe the feeling we experience when, appreciating the peace that emanates from a Hindu text, we remember the barbarities described by Oliveira Martins committed on Indian soil. It is astonishing. To imagine the Portuguese, precisely in this land where peace is sacred, arriving like demons, robbing and ravaging, setting fires, stealing, murdering and subjugating. And, even in the less violent landings, corrupting by the unbridled exercise of the grossest vices, of the most radical materialism. The thought of Indian cities being transformed into the receptacle of those astonishing perversions, the destination of the greatest earthly ambitions, the paradise of depravity… it is best not to continue.

The most impressive thing about medieval art, in which there is a fabulous and dizzying profusion of symbols, both as a whole and in detail, is that it reveals a man accustomed to extracting meaning from everything, a man for whom nothing can exist without an implicit meaning, a man incapable of representing something that only speaks in a literal sense. This marvelous imaginative capacity, in itself, is a trophy that consecrates an era.

The study of history is unpleasant because it forces us to look at the whole man, in all his manifestations. As a result, it shows us not what we would like, but what has been, and we have to contend with the infinite cruelties attached to practically every “great deed”. The more we investigate, the shorter our list of admirers becomes, to the point where we begin to question whether it is really possible to know and admire someone at the same time.

Periodically, over the space of a few generations, societies have to revalidate the foundations bequeathed by tradition, and they do not do so until they go through the very same crises that led to the need for their establishment. The objective, to pacify understandings and avoid new crises, is achieved only until those who have kept it in their memory die, or not at all. History, in this respect, only demonstrates its failure to a few intellectuals.