Arquivo de literature | Page 110 of 111

About Self-Help Books

There are some things I find impossible, for example, Donald Trump dressed as Buddha at a carnival party. Another: an author of self-help with a Dostoevsky book in his hands. And not only Dostoevsky but Shakespeare too: writing self-help to someone who read Shakespeare is an absolute impossibility. I could continue extending the list of authors, but summary: the classics; no self-help author read the classics. And why is it so obvious? Because there is a total incompatibility between what is in the classics and what is found in self-help books. I reflect: there is an intellectual heritage transmitted through the centuries that must be respected and absorbed by someone who intends to teach lessons to others. If we still talk about Shakespeare, it is because there is something valuable, perennial, common to all mankind in Shakespeare. And I would even say that for someone who wants to know the human being at all or be minimally cultured, the classics are indispensable. I repeat, therefore, in my obsession: ten works, no more; I doubt that any self-help author has read ten works either between Shakespeare and Dostoevsky. Could the author understand nothing? I do not think so. Could the author see easy money in self-help? Maybe… But I feel free to be bold and generalize: a self-help book is not intellectually relevant — I am sorry, but it is not.

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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.

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Life As It Is, by Nelson Rodrigues

I threaten to press the key and, before pressing it, a wife cheats on her husband. My finger touches the keyboard and another consort repeats the action. I do not close the front line and thousands of wives — or would they be millions? — cheat on their husbands, on time, in various countries and several languages. Two thousand short stories Nelson wrote in series, day after day, for ten years, around the same theme: adultery. So it is just the question: would not he have exaggerated? Could not he perhaps have written a little less? From home, I hear the belt snap on the neighbor. No, no, no… Nelson undoubtedly got it right.

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About Dynamic Reading

I- Definitely, we cannot know more than the subject of a book by performing the techniques that make up so-called “dynamic reading”. I would say that this type of reading is exactly what Mortimer Adler called, in How to read a book, “inspectional reading” — the first of three readings that should be made in a book.

II- Books should be read slowly, calmly, while we annotate observations and highlight excerpts. A good book only delivers himself with effort.

III- Rodrigo Gurgel’s recommendation is worth: one should never advance in a book if something has not been understood. We should go back and reread as many times as necessary.

IV- “Dynamic reading”, however, can be used to decide whether or not a book deserves reading.

V- I read the above topics and i realize: nothing new; everything has been said and repeated exhaustive times by good readers. Why, therefore, there is still talk of “dynamic reading”?

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