I interchange Carpeaux and Burckhardt, and it is a real pleasure to be silent so that these intelligences may speak out. Carpeaux, it is impressive, always seems ready to introduce us to a new author, to take us physically through time and space, giving us his inexhaustible culture, painting cities, filling us with distant atmospheres, all this with a style that seems to blend the talent of an artist and the experience of a hundred lifetimes. Burckhardt, on the other hand, seems from the top of a tower, protected from the upheavals of his time and of all times, observing them all, analyzing them with the impartiality of a scientist and the inclinations of a dilettante. His prophecies are impressive. If unintentional, as Carpeaux himself suggests, they show a precise and unique understanding of the evolutionary processes of the culture and time in which he was inserted. It is truly a pleasure!
Tag: history
The Drama of D. Pedro II Is the Drama of a Camões
D. Pedro II, this man whose life contains a moving tragedy, a tragedy that became even more accentuated after his death, was not capable of putting it in a fair measure in the few verses he composed. They are weak verses, almost innocuous for someone who does not know his biography. But someone who knows it, and imagines the state of atrocious sadness in which they were written, the immeasurable grief of the man whose virtue was paid for with the most revolting injustice on the eve of his death, this person will forgive the aesthetic defects and will sincerely sympathize with the author’s misery. But here lie two moral problems that are hard to admit: the first, that art is indifferent to the sincerity of the author—in art, the most skillful may surpass the most sincere, even if his art amounts to a complete falsification of himself;—the second, that the moral elevation contained in the work matters little, as does the character of what it evokes. It is regrettable… The drama of D, Pedro II is the drama of a Camões, but of a Camões wronged in life and not rewarded by history, that cursed insensitive in which were deposited the last hopes of the noble soul corroded by grief. Would it be different if the verses were better? How useless to answer it…
It Is Truly Amazing How the Years…
It is truly amazing how the years, which seem like nothing, which pass imperceptibly, disfigure reality to a point where there is not a single remnant left of what once was. So close one century to the other, and sometimes so disparate as to be unrecognizable. Anyone who makes a thorough analysis of the customs of past eras will be amazed, to the same extent as if someone from the past could catch a glimpse of the future. In both cases, a mixture of strangeness, repulsion, incomprehension and astonishment. Astonishment because, in theory, the human species has always consisted of men. However, for sociology, it is possible to describe men from different times as distinct species.
The Biography of Ignatius of Loyola
The biography of Ignatius of Loyola seems fictitious. To read it in this century, to read it in the West, observing what the West has become, its great cities, its concerns, is like putting oneself in front of an absurd narrative. It is amazing the simplicity with which stupefying facts are presented in this “Autobiography”, written by Father Luís Gonçalves da Câmara, who limited himself to transcribing what he heard from the mouth of Ignatius. A few times, we read that Ignatius risked his life during his trajectory, but the impression we get is that, since he left his father’s house, he was always under constant threat. Imprisonment, trials, persecution, sickness, incredible poverty… it is hard to imagine harsher conditions for this man reputed to be a saint. The mere fact that he passed the sixth decade of his life, as he did, already seems to us, unaccustomed men, a true miracle.