English journal

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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. 

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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

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

Serious Noticing

What do writers do when they seriously notice the world? Perhaps they do nothing less than rescue the life of things from their death – from two deaths, one small and one large: from the ‘death’ which literary form always threatens to impose on life, and from actual death. Which is to say, they rescue us from our death. I mean the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us – the memories of our childhood, the almost-forgotten pungency of flavours, smells, textures: the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention. Growing older, says Knausgaard, is like standing in front of a mirror while holding another behind one’s head, and seeing the receding dance of images – ‘becoming smaller and smaller as far as the eye could see’. Knausgaard’s world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary – the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it (‘the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation’) – is steadily retreating; in which things and objects and sensations are pacing towards meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer’s task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat: to bring meaning, colour, and life back to the most ordinary things – to football boots and grass, to cranes and trees and airports, and even to Gibson guitars and Roland amplifiers and Old Spice and Ajax. ‘You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyroka bindings and Koflack boots,’ he writes.

The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coque football boots was just a pair of football boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

Serious Noticing, James Wood

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"They rode all day the day following through the hill country to the west. As they rode they cut strips of the smoked and half dried deermeat and chewed on it and their hands were black and greasy and they wiped them on the withers of the horses and passed the canteen of water back and forth between them and admired the country. There were storms to the south and masses of clouds that moved slowly along the horizon with their long dark tendrils trailing in the rain. That night they camped on a ledge of rock above the plains and watched the lightning all along the horizon provoke from the seamless dark the distant mountain ranges again and again. Crossing the plain the next morning they came upon standing water in the bajadas and they watered the horses and drank rainwater from the rocks and they climbed steadily into the deepening cool of the mountains until in the evening of that day from the crest of the cordilleras they saw below them the country of which they’d been told. The grasslands lay in a deep violet haze and to the west thin flights of waterfowl were moving north before the sunset in the deep red galleries under the cloudbanks like schoolfish in a burning sea and on the foreland plain they saw vaqueros driving cattle before them through a gauze of golden dust."

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy

Vinte e Nove Murmúrios

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PDF: Vinte e Nove Murmúrios

EPUB: Vinte e Nove Murmúrios

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 “(...) the plane lifted up through the blue dusk into sunlight again and banked over the city and the moon dropped down the glass of the cabin like a coin falling through the sea. . . . Far below the shape of the city in its deep mauve grids like a vast motherboard.”

— Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger