Tag: literature

Even though they border on the unreal and inconceivable, mystical texts are undoubtedly more enjoyable reading than the petty literature of the banal. Because the former, like legends and fantastic literature, has a much more stimulating suggestive content than this commonplace realism, which makes reading seem like a tremendous waste of time. If it is to immerse oneself in letters, let it be so that the mind expands, and not so that it becomes trapped in what requires neither letters nor imagination.

The best literature is always that which is most connected to direct experience, on which the author’s individuality rests. No matter how much or how well he idealizes, his spirit will be most intense when describing not what he imagines, but what he knows. This is why, in many cases, it is the biography that supports the author.

Hindu literature, whose real exuberance existing translations have not yet been able to reveal to the West, can no longer inspire anything but awe in the Westerner who investigates it. The truth is that, sometimes, an imaginatively poor and precariously translated Hindu text is already capable of evoking a reality so impressive that only by using all his imaginative capacity can the Westerner conceive of it. It is therefore worth admiring it, even if grasping it may seem unfeasible or inconvenient.

If there is one thing that is well portrayed in Brazilian literature, it is the discouraging, corrosive and even oppressive influence of an environment that represents the antithesis of any higher aspiration. The unfortunate who experiences it in this environment often finds himself crushed by a multiplicity of factors that not only exceed him in strength, but seem to work ceaselessly to ensure that he never breaks free. The most dramatic thing about this situation is that it does not just take a gigantic force of will to overcome it, but that it must be constant: a single weakening, a single giving way of the spirit and the whole of the said multiplicity of factors will reveal itself with maximum power, pulling him down. To resist it, it seems, one has to be more than just a man.