It is always with a smile on my face that I read diaries of men from other times. It is wonderful to compare their routines, their means, everything!, with what I can call my reality. I now close the tiny Diário íntimo of Fernando Pessoa, which covers a mere two months of the poet’s life. It is simply amazing the exercise of comparison, using me as a guinea pig. The first necessity, whenever I read this kind of diary, is for me to adapt the meaning of some words and expressions. For example: the poet says several times “I got up early”, or “I came downtown early”. That means, in my language, “I woke up at nine”, “I left home at ten”. Then, the routine. The poet was always taking walks around Lisbon, having fun from Sunday to Sunday, walking from one office to another, where he sent personal letters and composed verses. In between walks, he made countless stops in the illustrious Brasileira to chat with friends and acquaintances. Once in a while, a quick task, which was followed by more walks and more talkings, almost always literary. What is this? How is it possible? An animal like me, the offspring of a slave generation, cannot assimilate. Is it literature? If I kept a diary, at the age of twenty-four, like the poet, it would be enough to relate a single day to tell how they all were: “I woke up in a bad mood at 5:30 a.m. I went to work. I left it at 5:30 p.m. College. Exhausted, I got home at 10:45 p.m. Unhappy day”. And what about the conversations, the reading of poems in the middle of Monday? I get a chill. If I saw, live and in color, a guy reciting a poem, or simply saying that he read this or that novel, it would be like witnessing a rajah, riding an elephant, strolling down the avenues of my city. Unbelievable! But the reading pleases me and shows me, like no other, the subject that I really am.
Tag: literature
Incompatibilities Between Superior Minds
It is curious to note some incompatibilities between superior minds. There seems to be an obscure element that, in some cases, forces their repulsion. I say this thinking of Pessoa and Nietzsche, or rather, of Pessoa towards Nietzsche. The Portuguese referred to the German as a mad ascetic admirer of force and domination. In other notes, the mention of Nietzsche is almost always loaded with a pejorative tone. The curious thing is this: as artists, there is much in common between the two. In the short essay entitled Apontamentos para uma Estética não Aristotélica (Notes on a Non-Aristotelian Aesthetic), Pessoa defends an aesthetic based on force, an aesthetic where the supreme degree of expression is reached through maximum power, an aesthetic in which the artist “forces others, whether they like it or not, to feel what he felt, that dominates them through inexplicable force, as the strongest athlete dominates the weakest, as the spontaneous dictator subdues the whole people (because he is the whole synthesized and therefore stronger than the whole summed up), as the founder of religions dogmatically and absurdly converts the souls of others into the substance of a doctrine which, at the bottom, is nothing but himself”. Nietzsche, a symbol of the power of expression, the progenitor of a work where exclamations leap out of the leaves like rockets, said that “the greatness of an artist is measured according to the intensity employed to achieve the great style.” It is a nice summary of Pessoa’s aesthetic theory. But still, incompatible…
Becoming an Expert
I write a short story with coldness and dryness in mind, and I notice that I am already becoming an expert in this kind of narrative that does nothing but arouse disgusting feelings. I deprive it of any color, any liveliness, any emotion. I also forbid exclamations: I make astonishment an outsider. One word to describe the scene. Scarce adjectives. The arc of action, naturally, cruel. I finish the work, and the result is astonishing. I immediately think of Swift. And I then imagine myself banished from the Human Race and defamed for centuries of centuries.
The Cemetery of Great Works
I stand here, thinking, about the size of the cemetery of great works. By a natural tendency, the greatest artists are drawn into isolation and, by an equally natural consequence, remain mostly anonymous. Some—would be many?—end up being rewarded by history. But what about the others? how many would there be? I have never had the opportunity to enter an old library; if I had, I would be obliged to estimate the proportion of anonymous on the literary shelves. Not that there is any justice in this world, nor that one should write aiming at any award, but a brief reflection on the aforementioned cemetery makes my mind completely black. To think of the effort of a lifetime, the courageous stance and endurance, hard-fought, wasted… useless like everything else… I think about it and cursing the world feels like an obligation.