A whole year to weave a handful of verses! And I still have not finished them… The sensation is of an unacceptable slowness for someone who has in his own work the raison d’être. It bothers, and bothers a lot, this tortoise-like productivity, when at the same time the ideas seem desperate, banging on the bars of a cage, clamoring for release. They want to flood the papers immediately, as I also want to, but I do not let go of the prudent recommendation of “one job at a time”. There is no way to ignore the possibility of an immediate death: should such a scenario come true, there would remain, to a much greater extent than the very few verses I have composed, a disorganized and almost incomprehensible jumble of notes.
Tag: literature
The Design of the “Great Work”
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.
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.