Goethe, in the Conversations, regrets having allowed himself to be seduced by the design of the “great work”. He says he knows how much it has harmed him, and regrets that he has allowed himself to block his mind for its valiant spontaneous manifestations which, although they demanded attention, had to be discarded for the sake of the greater goal. Understandable… it is not hard to admit that something is lost due to this need for concentration of effort that is imperative for the creation of a “major work”, as Goethe says. But perhaps it is a fair price, as perhaps it is risky to bet all one’s chips on a fragmentary, occasionally inspired work. Much of Goethe derives from Faust, and if he lost something by creating it, well, he gained it after all! It is very difficult to fully adhere to the recommendation to avoid the “great works” when we see that the best of the great authors have come from them. If, on the one hand, it is very justly observed that they are dangerous, and that perhaps they are not indicated for the majority of artists, on the other hand, in some cases it seems extremely beneficial to channel efforts toward a single purpose.
Tag: literature
Once the Custom of the Concise…
Once the custom of the concise, direct, and objective sentence has become entrenched, so fashionable these days that it is almost a requirement of style, it is a pleasure to sporadically plunge into the pace of other times, slow, cadenced, seeming to show that art is not made in a hurry, that attention asks for details, adds nuances, and singularizes while it is extended. Immersing in this slow pace is like escaping from modern banality, and as the periods progress we are left with the sensation of a depth that escapes this time, which has been lost in futile priorities and has become an enemy of that tranquil state that accentuates the human tendency for contemplation.
There Is Something Truly Brilliant About Gilberto Freyre
There is something truly brilliant in the way Gilberto Freyre constructs his works. At first, the unclassifiable character of all of them is impressive, that is, the character of a mixture, of works devoted to many, and not only to one science. From the preface, one can already notice an impressive heap of contrasting references, which instigates curiosity about how they will harmonize in the following pages. Then Gilberto Freyre begins his prose, interweaving anthropology and sociology, synthesis and reports, passing from an inventory of customs to historical events, penetrating into the innermost recesses of his characters, and all this pile up slowly forms a complex and vividly colored picture that hardly a purely sociological, anthropological or historiographical work would be able to match. It is as if he methodically changes the shade of the paint after painting several paragraphs with a single color. After many pages, when it is already possible to observe the whole, we feel before a work with historiographical precision, but painted with literary subtlety in the construction of the characters, in the minuteness of details, in the representation of the sociocultural environments that served as background for the historical period approached. It is clear that his works, constructed in this way, cannot please those who are crazy about the objectivity of facts—but these, knowing them, will never be able to interpret them.
There Is Something Brilliant and Very Curious in Symbolism
No matter how much one speaks against the obscurity of Symbolism or, more specifically, of the Symbolist poets, the truth is that there is something brilliant and very curious about this expressive technique that seems to be hidden when, in fact, it opens up to unfathomable possibilities. In poetry, words acquire an unusual weight when evoked. A verse devoid of syntactic nexus but abundant in suggestive words will indeed have a strong effect on the mind of the reader. If one constructs “Rainy day; pain; fatigue and discouragement”, although not logically connected by an argument, the mind, upon reading such words, immediately relates them and forms an image possessing the logical link that seems to be missing. Thus, the poet manages to make them manifest themselves in individualized nuances for each reader. If, at times, obscurity can be boring, at other times it can generate very interesting and almost unlimited effects.