30/08/2024 — One of the oddest aspects of trying to write or speak in another language is that you feel like you’re another person. A simpler, more shallow, and perhaps more ridiculous one. Still, it’s an opportunity to experiment with this tool we call language in a more mindful, childlike, and refreshed way. Reflecting on language like this makes me wonder if I’m not exactly this way also in Portuguese, my native language. After all, most of what I say consists of ready-made formulas that come automatically and effortlessly to me. But because there are so many flexible formulas, I get the illusion that rearranging them amounts to me thinking for myself.
*
12/09/2024 — The past of 2024 is already larger than its future. Six months have passed since the trip to Southeast Asia. The places we visited, the experiences we lived, are now memories, and I’m not sure how much — if at all — they have changed me. It's 9:32 AM here, 7:32 PM in sweltering Bangkok, which I just glimpsed through a live camera on Sukhumvit Road. Vietnam is now facing typhoons, landslides, and floods. Brazil is burning, with fires destroying the Pantanal and preservation areas in the southeast, north, and northeast. The smoke has reached here, where the sun, behind a dreadful veil, is an ominous neon-orange ball.
Life, according to Joseph Brodsky, is monotony and repetition. And it’s the fear of this monotony, of being trapped in a certain way of living — which we cleverly mask with tasks whose urgency we invent — that makes me think of change. The questions I asked myself before the trip, about whether I’d return changed in some way, and the expectation that I would, still make me wonder. Perhaps tourism — consumed as an entertainment experience, a product — doesn’t change anyone. But why change at all, I also ask. Well, to rid oneself of the sense of passivity, of lost time, of being trapped in a way of being that is apathetic, selfish, cowardly — a way of being not deliberately chosen but one we fell into through life’s contingencies. ‘You must change your life,’ writes Rilke. But where does the strength to do so come from? The strength to impose your will on human fiction, which slowly crushes us until we are as thin as paper, docile and receptive to whatever is imposed on us? The impulse to change from within is much harder to manifest; one must be exceptional — and few are. So we usually depend on external events, something shocking, disorienting, that scrapes away the mold that’s settled over the years, preventing us from seeing reality more clearly. Deep grief, a child, unemployment. Surely, there are people who, instinctively knowing themselves to be weak — without fully understanding why — provoke external events to force change. It’s a desperate act, not always recognized by those who commit it. But even then, it’s not guaranteed. Change that results from an external event (grief, a child) can be quickly reversed, depending on how crushed and docile you already are. You might see clearly for a time, understand all the problems of your previous way of living, and yet, out of fear or comfort, surrender to it again.
*
15/09/2024
— I
show a piece of literary text I wrote to a friend. He messages me from Naples,
saying, among other things, he misses a bit of politics in the piece. He also
says that every good writer is left-wing. His words kind of get under my skin. So, breaking my stay-offline-on-Sundays rule, I decide to write him a — somewhat
unnecessary, somewhat untimely, somewhat serious — response, but something I've
been meaning to say to him for a while:
My dear friend, I don't mean to be rude, but it seems we see art from slightly different angles. I'm not looking for art to reaffirm my political beliefs. I'm after something else: complexity, discomfort, friction, and sometimes even a sense of disturbance.
You see,
literature that sets out to sell political ideas is nothing more than shallow
propaganda. Literature (and art in general) is about ambiguity. It’s precisely
about challenging stereotypes like the idea that “every good writer must be
left-wing” by showing the complexity of human beings (how a criminal can have
good in them, how a good person can have bad in them). In other words, it’s
about the complexity and ambiguity of reality.
Literature becomes political by expanding
consciousness and sensitivities, by awakening the imagination. This can be done
through 20 pages of descriptions of a tree, for instance, showing the richness
of reality and broadening the limits of what the reader can see in the world,
making them see the invisible (in other words, making them see more and thus
enabling reflection on the absurdity of existence and the way we live). All
this without directly talking about politics.
That’s what I
believe when it comes to art and literature.
*
04/10/2024 — For no obvious reason, "TV Colosso's" opening theme song lodged itself in my brain and keeps looping relentlessly. An ear worm that came from nowhere, or at least nowhere I can track. TV Colosso was this kids' show that ran from ‘93 to ‘97, back when I was like 6 or 8. I'm wondering what the hell did I see or hear that set this off. Either way, it’s driving me nuts in a totally ridiculous way.
*
08/10/2024 — But I stand here on the shore, toes in the water, the great mass of it rising before me, and yet... someday, someday, I say.
*
11/10/2024 — Today, oddly enough, I remembered my trip to Patagonia, in April 2016. It's a shame that my memory is so precarious and that I didn’t take notes during the trip or afterward. But I do remember the atmosphere at the hostel, with live music and a lot of people from all over the world, all of us drinking and eating together and the freezing cold outside, which we could see through the glass windows; I do remember one night going to the reception during the early hours because in my room there was a lady snoring so loudly I couldn’t sleep a wink, and the friendly staff from Colombia who gave me a mattress and let me sleep in the mezzanine above the reception; I remember trekking on the glacier for ten hours the next day, and the Canadian guy I made friends with, and how I was so worn out afterward that I crashed instantly as soon as we got to the bus; I also remember I didn't have mobile internet and I hadn’t pre-booked much of anything; I remember an Italian guy who helped me open my locker in the bedroom while telling me about his previous night camping somewhere in the wilderness; I remember going to Él Chaltén and trekking for hours with a German girl, an Argentinian girl and a Mexican guy and that the same evening we cooked dinner together at the hostel and drank wine and laughed out loud and I felt like I was part of something, which is quite rare to me...
14/10/2024 — We often assume we are more or less able to predict how we’ll feel in the face of a totally different scenario in the future. We simply take our mind as it is right now, in the present, and project it into this hypothetical scenario. But in the future the ground on which our current mindset rests will have shifted in ways we can’t now understand. It’s like asking Socrates to imagine living in the 20th century, when Socrates couldn’t even dream of something called electricity. In the same way, our attempts to imagine how we would feel or who we could be in a future scenario are always bound by the limits of our current understanding. That’s why we’ll never be prepared for the death of a loved one — the ground shifts.
*
18/10/2024 — Last night, we were attending a christening course, and while listening to the church's volunteer lecture about the Christian faith and reminding us that we are all sinners, I found myself wondering…
If God is all-knowing, then He must have known that Adam and Eve would sin even before He created them. So, why create them with this inherent flaw in the first place? Being all-powerful, He could have chosen a different course. Why didn’t He? That makes the whole story feel predestined rather than the result of true free will. Similarly, if Judas' betrayal of Jesus was necessary for God's plan, how can it genuinely be considered a betrayal? It was part of the divine design. This raises further doubts about free will, as the events seemed bound to unfold that way.
Then there's the question of Jesus Christ’s coming to earth to redeem our sins: was He the Son of God, was He God Himself, or was He somehow both? The volunteer reminds us He was both. And how strange is this persistent notion that humanity remains in a state of sinfulness, always in debt to God, even after Christ’s (Who is God) supposed redemption. Wouldn’t a truly forgiving deity absolve humanity entirely, without constantly reminding them of their debt? Forgiveness is offered, yet the burden of sin never seems to lift.
I understand that religious narratives provide comfort for many of us, especially in times of loss or uncertainty. People rely on these stories to navigate the unknown. And while I remain conscious of the immense absurdity of existence, which makes it hard to rule anything out, I personally find this story — of accusation and a God who keeps humanity in perpetual moral debt — difficult to accept.
Plate tectonics account for everything from the growth of mountains to the rearrangement over time of oceans and continents, but they are also the reason our planet is habitable. When an oceanic plate bumps into a continental plate, it starts sliding beneath the continental one, carrying water and carbon dioxide in vast quantities into the interior of the planet. (Many scientists believe that there’s more water in the mantle than in all the oceans of the world combined.) These are then gradually released via volcanic eruptions, forming what Bjornerud calls “an ultraslow-motion, planetary-scale respiratory system,” without which we would have long since lost our atmosphere. Such was the fate of Mars, which has a single, rigid, planetwide plate that does not move relative to its mantle. Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, Earth is the only planet that has continents.
Kathryn Schulz em resenha de Marcia Bjornerud’s Turning to Stone
