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"He was in a residential area now, completely lost. A man in an undershirt dragged three garbage bags across the street. A clean light soaked into the shaggy bark of a eucalyptus and it was a powerful thing to see, the whole tree glowed, it showed electric and intense, the branches ran soft fire, the tree seemed revealed. The man dumped the bags at the corner and came back across the street and Bill nodded to him and walked on, hearing a garbage truck work up the hill."

— Don Delillo, Mao II

Microcosmo como macrocosmo

      “O átomo era um sistema cósmico carregado de energia, e em cujo seio gravitavam planetas, numa rotação de espantosa rapidez, em torno de um centro semelhante ao sol, e cujo éter era percorrido a uma velocidade só mensurável em anos-luz, por cometas mantidos nas suas órbitas excêntricas pela força do corpo central. E isso não é uma simples comparação, tão pouco quanto o seria a que define o organismo multicelular como um “Estado de células”. A cidade, o Estado, a comunidade social organizada segundo o princípio da divisão do trabalho não somente era comparável à vida orgânica, mas até a repetia exatamente. Da mesma forma repetia-se no seio da natureza, na mais extrema redução, o universo estelar macrocósmico cujos grupos, nebulosas, constelações, configurações pairavam empalidecidos pela lua, acima do vale cintilante de neve, ante os olhos do nosso adepto. Não seria lícito pensar que certos planetas do sistema solar atômico — esses enxames e essas vias lácteas de sistemas solares que compunham a matéria —, ora, que um e outro desses corpos celestes do mundo interior se encontravam numa condição semelhante à que fazia da Terra uma sede da vida? Para um jovem adepto meio embriagado no seu íntimo, e cuja pele se achava num estado “anormal”, para um homem que já não estava completamente sem experiência no terreno das coisas proibidas, tal suposição não somente não era extravagante, mas até se impunha com uma insistência inelutável, parecendo evidente e tendo todo o cunho de lógica e de verdade. A “pequenez” dos corpos celestes do mundo interior seria uma objeção pouco incisiva, já que a medida do que era grande ou pequeno perdia-se, mais tardar, no momento em que se evidenciava o caráter cósmico das partes “mais minúsculas” da matéria, e já que os conceitos de “exterior” e “interior” também viam abalada sua solidez. O mundo do átomo era um “exterior”, ao passo que o astro terrestre que habitamos era, se considerado do ponto de vista orgânico, um profundo “interior”, provavelmente. Não chegara certo sábio, nos seus sonhos audaciosos, a falar dos animais da Via Láctea, monstros cósmicos, cuja carne, cujo esqueleto e cérebro se compunham de sistemas solares? Mas, se isso sucedia assim como se afigurava a Hans Castorp, tudo começava apenas no instante em que se imaginava ter alcançado o término! Era possível que, no fundo íntimo e mais remoto do seu ser, talvez se encontrasse ele mesmo, o jovem Hans Castorp, mais uma vez, e mais cem vezes, bem agasalhado num compartimento de sacada com vista sobre a noite glacial e enluarada dos Alpes, a estudar a vida do corpo, com os dedos enregelados e as faces ardentes, sob o impulso de um interesse médico-humanista?”

— Thomas Mann, A Montanha Mágica, p.327-8.

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Insignificância e sentido
 
Last year, I went to the memorial service of a man I had never met. He was the younger brother of a friend of mine, and had died suddenly, in the middle of things, leaving behind a wife and two young daughters. The program bore a photograph of the man, above his compressed dates (1968-2012). He looked ridiculously young, blazing with life—squinting a bit in bright sunlight, smiling slightly, as if he were just beginning to get the point of someone’s joke. In some terrible way, his death was the notable, the heroic fact of his short life; all the rest was the usual joyous ordinariness, given form by various speakers. Here he was, jumping off a boat into the Maine waters; here he was, as a child, larkily peeing from a cabin window with two young cousins; here he was, living in Italy and learning Italian by flirting; here he was, telling a great joke; here he was, an ebullient friend, laughing and filling the room with his presence. As is generally the case at such final celebrations, speakers struggled to expand and hold the beautifully banal instances of a life, to fill the space between 1968 and 2012, so that we might leave the church thinking not of the first and last dates but of the dateless minutes in between.

—    James Wood, Why?

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A arrogância humana

[...] I’m frightened by what the most extraordinary of Italian poets, Giacomo Leopardi, calls “the night sky full of worlds”. I’m also frightened by the conceited small-mindedness of human beings when they consider themselves elect creatures. I have no liking for the throne we have assigned ourselves by declaring that we are beloved children of God and lords of the universe.

The pride that derives from that distresses me – that, although we are animals among animals, we believe we have the right to enslave the rest of the living world. This makes us dangerous, and at the same time ridiculous. However much we empower ourselves with increasingly sophisticated technology, we remain comic creatures, like the cat that a child dresses as if it were her doll. It’s urgent that we learn to confront the truth of ourselves, before we’re destroyed by our obstinate determination to become immortal. The animal man has to be self-critical. The future that interests me is a future of absolute openness to the other, to any living being, to everything endowed with the breath of life.

— Elena Ferrante

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O contexto histórico em que emergiu Crime e Castigo

(…) Russian students like Crime and Punishment’s antihero, the 23-year-old Raskolnikov, were bombarded with somewhat distorted and jumbled versions of English utilitarianism, French utopian socialism, and Darwinism. Taken together, they created an intellectual climate that, in Dostoyevsky’s estimation, put too much stock in the ability of science and scientific reasoning to explain human behavior. 

These various theories of social improvement became distilled for a Russian audience in the work of Nikolai Chernyshevsky, whose novel of ideas What Is to Be Done? (1863) modeled a philosophy that would later be described as “rational egoism.” Rational egoism relied on the idea that human beings, guided by enlightened self-interest, would ultimately choose to live in a fair and equal society. The idea inspired a generation of young Russians coming of age in the wake of Czar Alexander II’s “great reforms” (which included the abolition of serfdom and the establishment of local forms of self-government), who wanted to push Russian society along further and more quickly through a revolution that they believed began with remaking themselves and interrogating their own desires. Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, could not abide this scientific dissection of desire, believing that people were ultimately unaware of why they wanted the things they wanted. He knew human beings to be irrational and profoundly self-destructive. He saw these tendencies in his own propensity for gambling, procrastination, and daily forms of self-ruin.

Dostoyevsky was especially appalled by Chernyshevsky’s claim that actions taken in pursuit of a better society were themselves necessarily good. He saw in this seemingly innocent theory a potential justification for violence. Wasn’t Raskolnikov, in killing an avaricious pawnbroker who lent money at predatory rates and abused her sister, acting in the interest of the greater good? It was the same danger that Dostoyevsky recognized in the nihilists and anarchists, who by the 1870s and ’80s had indeed turned to terrorism to achieve their ends. The 1881 assassination of Alexander II caused many later readers to see in Dostoyevsky’s novel something like a prophecy.

(…) Reading Crime and Punishment in 2018, we are reminded of the need to take irrationality and willful self-destruction seriously. They are not only born out of individual choice; they are social forces that can play a much larger role in our politics than we might care to admit.

—  Jennifer Wilson, The World of Crime and Punishment