Jerusalem - The Biography, by Simon Sebag Montefiore

This book is an excellent read for anyone who, like me, likes History. Very well written, amazingly even-balanced considering the subject sometimes touchy and the author being related to one of the prominent English-Jewish families who mattered in the city's history, exhaustively researched, it reads almost like an adventure book. One is drawn into the complexities of a city so revered for millenia by so many peoples, empires and religions, and it helps to understand its present dilemmas. It's a fascinating story indeed, full of sound and fury as the Bard would say, and with many humorous and unexpected details.

The book is organized chronologically - after opening with the description of the siege and conquest by Titus, it goes back to the origins of the Canaanite city and then proceeds along the centuries until the war of 1967, with a short epilogue about the last 40 years. One of the interesting insights is the notion of how many important population shifts there were, and it shows the roots of the present Arab and Jewish presence in and attachment to the city. One can sense the passing of time and the changes it brings, and how history is ever changing.

The author tries to be impartial about the present conflicts, and I think he reasonably succeeds. He tells his story passionately, though, and ends in a somehow gloomy mode of sursis, balanced between the sense of History's continuity and timelessness (expressed by the description, in the last chapter, of the routines of the several religious shrines in the Old City) and the impending doom hovering over the city caused by the present situation.

Jerusalem today lives in a state of schizophrenic anxiety. Jews and Arabs dare not venture into each other's neighbourhoods; secular Jews avoid ultra-Orthodox who stone them for not resting on the Sabbath or for wearing disrespectful clothing; messianic Jews test police resolve and tease Muslim anxiety by attempting to pray at the Temple Mount; and the Christian sects keep brawling. The faces of Jerusalemites are tense, their voices are angry and one feels that everyone, even those of all three faiths who are convinced that they are fulfilling a divine plan, is unsure of what tomorrow will bring.

And yet, things can be, and were different, as one can read in a previous chapter about the 19th century:

... but in between, in a half-submerged folk culture, there was much blending, despite the stringent rules of each religion. At the end of the Ramadan fast, all the religions celebrated celebrated with a feast and a fair around the walls, with merry-go-rounds and horseraces, while vendors exhibited obscene peepshows and Arab sweets, Maidens Hair and Turkish Delight. During the Jewish festival of Purim, Muslim and Christian Arabs dressed up in the traditional Jewish costumes, and all three religions attended the Jewish Picnic held at the tomb of Simon the Just north of the Damascus Gate. Jews presented their Arab neighbours with matzah and invited them to the Passover Seder dinner, while the Arabs returned the favour by giving the Jews newly baked bread when the festival ended.Jewish mohels often circumcised Muslim children. Jews held parties to welcome their Muslim neighbours back from the haj. The closest relations were between Arabs and Sephardic Jews. Indeed the Arabs called the Sephardis "Yahud, awlad Arab - Jews, sons of Arabs", their own Jews and some Muslim women even learned Ladino. During droughts, the ulema asked the Sephardic rabbis to pray for rain. The Sephardic, Arab-speaking Valeros, the city's leading bankers, were business partners with many of the Families. Ironically, the Arab Orthodox Christians were the most hostile to Jews, whom they insulted in traditional Easter songs and lynched as they approached the Church.

Pessimism

This month I have been to some end-of-specialty exams, where young specialists get their degree recognized by our Medical Board after a 5 years internship. The final question to a girl who had performed magnificently was: "so what do you think will be the challenges in the Nephrology field in the next 2 decades?". Her answer was about finding cheaper ways to treat patients, containing dialysis costs, the ethical questions of withholding treatment... A member of the jury then vented what we, older nephrologists, were thinking: "this is the sad result of the state of psychiatric depression that comes from the economic depression... How differently we all would have answered that question 20 years ago!".

Actually, everything she said was quite right and legitimate. But she wasn't talking about challenges for the next 2 decades, she was talking about our present concerns, the challenges we're facing right now. Any one of us, older guys, would have talked about stem cells, xenotransplantation, portable artificial kidneys, whatever. And it made us really sad that the present generation is so burdened with the financial crisis and its troubles that they cannot envisage a different future. That's one of the main problems with economic depression, the effect it has on people, it shortens their views, their horizons. People worry about the present, the morrow, stop thinking big.

What a difference from 38 years ago, when Lisbon - and all Portugal - was burning with hope, the 48 year-old decrepit dictatorship toppled by a coup by young army officers! For all the naiveté, for the the blunders in the next few years, it was a time of overflowing optimism. I was just a child then but I'm happy to have lived through those times, when people believed things would be better and were actually doing something for that. Will we ever be that optimistic again?

Les Yeux Ouverts - Entretiens avec Mathieu Galey, by Marguerite Yourcenar

(So, my first post after the one in which I explain why I’m posting in English is in Portuguese… Not very coherent, but there’s a simple enough reason – I think about Marguerite Yourcenar in Portuguese or in French, and I read this book in Portuguese… But I will try to translate, it will be an useful exercise, even if not very successful… Critics welcome!)

I always admired immensely Marguerite Yourcenar’s work, ever since I read, when I was 18 or 19, Memoirs of Hadrian (that I reread several times since – and I still haven’t read it in French, an old project I haven’t fulfilled for a number of reasons, but the Portuguese translation seems excellent. Through the years, I read almost all her books, the novels (my favorites, after Hadrian, are L’Oeuvre au Noir and Alexis), her many superb essays, her letters, and even her biography by Josyanne Savigneau. I just had the opportunity to read Les Yeux Ouverts now, recently republished after the former edition being sold out for many years.

It’s a long interview, in which Marguerite Yourcenar discusses about everything: her life (she had just published two books of the trilogy about her family’s history, Le Labyrinthe du Monde), her books, her way of working, her opinions and life philosophy. And this reading confirmed the idea I had about her. A woman of huge intelligence and sensibility, extremely strong and clearminded, observant and keen in her vision of the world and human condition, but of a great intellectual arrogance, even if under an apparent modesty, that makes me wonder she must have been a not very nice people in every day life. I had this feeling from Savigneau’s biography, and especially from her correspondence in Lettres à ses Amis et Quelques Autres. Her many petty lawsuits against her publishers, the maniac insistence in controlling her public image, the paternalistic tone in which she addressed her admirers, a former pupil’s statement that “it was impossible to picture her using something like a hair drier”, her stance above politics and the repeated assumption that she didn’t care about class and cultural background, that always sounds to me like the statement of someone that can feel above those issues precisely because she comes from a privileged and educated class that allows her to ignore those issues.

But what’s really important about a writer is his work, and Yourcenar’s is magnificent. She’s right when she repeatedly states that trying to know details about a writer’s life misses the point, that’s his work that’s essential, because after all his core message is there. And I really like what she says about her books’ genesis, the way she thought them and wrote them; it’s always extremely interesting to know the way a writer works. And her writing was extremely good, every time I read Mémoires d’Hadrien, for instance, it fascinates me the way each word, each sentence, seems so exactly right, the way it should be, just perfect. And, as much as she might have been unsympathetic or proudly aristocratic, her understanding of man and the world, her connection to a kind of universality and timelessness of life is admirable and inspiring.

De Olhos Abertos - Conversas com Mathieu Galey, de Marguerite Yourcenar

Sempre admirei imensamente a obra de Marguerite Yourcenar, desde que li, aos 18 ou 19 anos, o excepcional Memórias de Adriano, que desde então reli várias vezes - e ainda me falta lê-lo em francês, um velho projecto que por um motivo ou outro ainda não realizei, mas a tradução para português é de enorme qualidade. Ao longo dos anos, fui lendo quase tudo o que escreveu, desde os romances (os meus favoritos, depois do Adriano, são A Obra ao Negro e Alexis), os muitos excelentes ensaios, as cartas, e mesmo a sua biografia por Josyanne Savigneau. Só agora tive oportunidade de ler De Olhos Abertos, recentemente reeditado após a edição anterior ter esgotado há muitos anos.

Trata-se de uma longa entrevista, em que Marguerite Yourcenar fala de tudo um pouco: da sua vida (tinha então publicado já dois livros da trilogia sobre a sua família, O Labirinto do Mundo), da sua obra, da sua forma de trabalhar, das suas opiniões e filosofia de vida. E esta leitura de certa forma confirmou a ideia que eu tinha dela. Uma mulher de enorme inteligência e sensibilidade, extremamente forte e lúcida, observadora e perspicaz na sua visão do mundo e da condição humana, mas de uma grande arrogância intelectual, se bem que apresentada sob uma pretensa modéstia, que me faz pensar que não devia ser uma pessoa muito agradável no tarcto e convivência diários. Ficara com essa impressão ao ler a biografia de Savigneau, e sobretudo ao ler uma recolha das suas cartas - Lettres à Ses Amis et Quelques Autres. Os seus numerosos e mesquinhos processos contra os seus sucessivos editores, a sua insistência maníaca em controlar a sua imagem, o tom paternalista com que dava conselhos aos seus admiradores, a declaração de uma antiga aluna de que "era impossível para nós imaginá-la a fazer coisas como usar um secador de cabelo", a sua postura acima da política e a posição repetidamente assumida de que para ela a classe e a cultura não contavam, que me soa sempre como a declaração de quem se pode colocar acima dessas questões precisamente porque uma classe e educação privilegiada lho permitem.

Mas o que interessa num escritor é sobretudo a sua obra, e a de Yourcenar é magnífica. Ela tem razão quando repetidamente afirma que procurar conhecer detalhes da vida de um escritor falha o essencial, que é a leitura da sua obra, porque ao fim e ao cabo, o principal, aquilo que ele nos transmite, está lá. E gosto muito do que ela diz sobre a forma como os seus livros foram pensados e escritos; é sempre muito interessante conhecer o método de trabalho de um escritor. E ela escrevia extremamente bem, quando leio Memórias de Adriano, por exemplo, fico sempre fascinado como cada palavra, cada frase, parece ser exactamente aquilo que devia ser, perfeita. E, por muito pouco simpática ou altivamente aristocrática que tenha sido, a sua compreensão do homem e do mundo, a sua ligação a uma universalidade e intemporalidade da vida é admirável e inspiradora.

(Why I'm writing in English)

I've been blogging, on and off, for about 7 years now. Don't know why I do it, I never took myself and these postings too seriously, but somehow sometimes I just feel the urge to write and post, like the "itching" Virginia Woolf describes in Orlando, or, as Marguerite Yourcenar says about writing, "there is, above all, a need to express oneself, that is very mysterious". Anyway, I just do it when I feel like it. And naturally I used to write in Portuguese, my mother-tongue and the one I feel most comfortable with. So why have I lately started to post in English?

The answer has to do with facebook. I never cared about having an audience, I just used to send my posts to the outer space, so to speak, and didn't think about who would read them, if anyone did. It was a somewhat liberating experience, just expressing my feelings anonymously to the outside world... But as time went by, several of my friends found out about it, and when I created a facebook account, I published the link to the blog, and later I posted a few of my blog links there. And since a good part of my facebook contacts are not Portuguese, I thought it would be better to post in English. Besides, it's a good exercise in English learning. I agree with Frederico Lourenço, when he says learning other languages widens our capacity of thinking, because there are untranslatable words for several ideas and feelings (he says so in an essay about why it's useful to learn Greek; I know no Greek - apart from a few words - but it applies to any language).

So, it's not (just) pretentiousness, my writing in English. Hope to learn something, anyway. And to make myself understood to a few people that, even if I never met them in person, came to mean a lot to me.

Hitch-22, by Christopher Hitchens

It was with some ambivalence that I ordered Hitch-22 from Amazon. I usually enjoy reading memoirs and biographies, as Marguerite Yourcenar used to say, History is made of person's histories, and an intelligent person remembering his life and times, or the story of an interesting person's course through life, can be very informative and enlightening about their time's history, and life in general. My ambivalence was due to, although generally agreeing with Hitchens's ideas (at least as far as I knew them) and liking his essays and denouncing of religious hypocrisy, I didn't much like the image I had from him from the media, and was somehow annoyed by the atheists hagiographic view of him, especially after his recent death (even if I admired immensely his brave attitude concerning his imminent demise). But my curiosity won, and I ordered it anyway - after all he came with the endorsement of some of my favorite contemporary writers, like Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.

And I'm glad I did it, it's a very interesting read. It's true some parts are quite boring, like his school days, and he indulges too much in a kind of over elaborate writing that evokes the great Bloomsbury tradition that he's just not up to - how infinitely superior is the elegance of Lytton Strachey, that he seems to try to emulate - and then he looks as just too vain.

But in the end, I found myself admiring and respecting him more than I did. His evocation of the '70s writers set let me down a bit, but I loved the way he speaks about the Rushdie question, and the chapter about the Jewish issue is a masterpiece. I like the way he parted with the old Left - the loony Left, as a friend of mine calls it - and I think he would probably be equally critic of his involvement with the neocons in a few years time (as I read in a very good article of Salman Rushdie's after his death). And I was moved by this statement about himself:

Plainly, this unwillingness to give ground even on unimportant disagreements is the symptom of some deepseated insecurity, as was my one-time fondness for making teasing remarks (which I amended when I read Anthony Powell's matter-of-fact observation that teasing is an unfailing sign of misery within) and as is my very pronounced impatience. The struggle, therefore, is to try and cultivate the virtuous side of these shortcomings: to be a genial host while only slightly whiffled, for example, or to be witty at the expense of one's own weaknesses instead of those of other people.

How I relate to that! That single paragraph could be enough to make me forgive his vanity and flamboyant demeanor. And I couldn't agree more with the statement with which he ends the book:

It's quite a task to combat the absolutists and the relativists at the same time: to maintain that there is no totalitarian solution while still insisting that, yes, we on our side also have unalterable convictions and are willing to fight for them.

Yes, we must certainly do have to unashamedly assert our values and beliefs. And I think that Christopher Hitchens, in spite of his vanity and self-assured ways, did just that and I admire him for it, and think the world is poorer after his death. And I intensely admire the brave way he dealt with his terminal illness, so well expressed in the preface.

A touch of madness

Sem a loucura que é o homem
mais que a besta sadia,
cadáver adiado que procria?

Fernando Pessoa

(attempt at translation:
Without madness what is man
but the healthy beast,
adjourned corpse that breeds?)

This is a beautiful sentence from one of our greatest poets; never mind the king he was talking about was a dimwit that verged on the moronic that led the country to lose its independence. But when he talks about madness, he means the unconventionality, the thinking outside the box, the grain of genius that makes people stand out against the dreary, common thinking. That kind of madness is good, it can be the sign of genius (again, not in the case of king Sebastião, but that's another question).

But then there is clinical madness, the kind that makes you lose touch with reality, the kind that makes you suffer. And there's nothing romantic or visionary about that. Madness is not Sylvie de Nogaret playing solitaire and chatting with her dead brother in Durrell's Monsieur (even if I like Durrell immensely); it's Virginia Woolf drowning herself because "the voices were coming back and this time they weren't going away", or a girl shivering in panic in a hospital room in a foreign town listening to the staff planning unspeakably horrible pranks to humiliate her.

Fortunately, I never experienced true madness. Anxiety, depression, panic, irritability, bad temper with loss of control, all that I've known, but never lost the sense of reality, never found myself in an alien world whose rules I could not understand or felt my sense of self shattered to smithereens. I watched it happen, and few things have scared me as much.

So, I guess a touch of madness is alright, even desirable, and I've known the liberating feeling of not caring at all about what other people think, but one must always be able to stop and not to lose control. And true madness, the psychotic kind, is never good, it always means too much suffering and can be literally fatal.

Family love

Every now and then I find myself questioning the causes and essence of family love. Mostly when I'm feeling unhappy about my family, and yet knowing I love them (thinking about my children). Family love is usually considered so obvious that most people find it shocking it be even questioned. How could you not unconditionally love your children, you're probably asking right now? What kind of monster, unnatural father could ever question his love for his children? OK, don't worry, I do love them. But I keep questioning nevertheless, because that's in my nature, and I really think one should try to understand our feelings, and not just take traditional "wisdom" for granted. And I think there's actually a lot to question about family love.

I always tended to believe what defines family relationships / feelings is inevitability. We don't choose our family (with the notable exception of our spouse, but more about that later). We start by not choosing our parents and siblings (and the extended family of grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins); it's our family and we grow among them, so they come to define what we consider normal (family relationships) from an early age. We usually don't question them much until adolescence, when we start thinking by ourselves and when the desire for emancipation makes us usually go through a phase of opposition to their values - but nevertheless those values are deeply embedded inside us and they tend to stay with us through our adult lives in some more or less perceptible way. We love our parents first because they are what we know, the persons who protect us and love us, who teach us everything, who are our role models - and even if we later disapprove of them, their values etc, they always leave some indelible impression on us, because we're "imprinted" by them since birth. But what about love? We need to love, and so we love them, they're there. I guess starting to notice their flaws is what makes adolescence such a troubled time.

In my case, I guess I was born in a pretty average family. I was loved by my parents and loved them back. Adolescence was a typically troubled time... Caught in a war between extremely intelligent, ambitious and strong willed parents, that was my notion of what was normal, I went through pretty intense feeling against one or the other, defining myself against a passionate and possessive mother and an accomplished and frequently absent father, both demanding and expecting what they considered the best from their children. Love didn't feel unconditional, my sisters and I felt pressured for accomplishment and excellence, and that was our normality, it shaped us that way. I hold no grudges against them, they were tough, but so were we. It was as it was, I can hardly imagine it differently - that's the inevitability of families.


Now I have my own family, as a parent. I didn't choose my children. They happened to be the way they are. They are very different from me, and I love them. I recently read a phrase that I most identified with: "as anyone who has had kids will tell you, love and complete exasperation are pretty much the defining emotions of parenthood.", by Alexis Petridis in The Guardian.

But, as Tina Turner would say, "what love has to do with it"? Why love? Why do I love these unbearable, annoying kids?

The first thing that comes into my mind to explain family love - love comes from habit, from shared experiences. We live together, we go through so much together, with our parents, our grandparents, our siblings, our children. Lots of small and great things. We were protected and cared for by our parents, we protect and care for our children. We're indelibly "imprinted" with the unequally incredible feelings aroused by taking care of our children, how could we not be overwhelmed by the incredible sensation of meaning so much to them when they're these tiny and vulnerable beings? Maybe it's then we build a truly inexhaustible capital of love to them. Whatever comes later, however big the exasperation Petridis talks about - and it can be really big - we never forget that feeling. And then there are all those countless private jokes, familiar reasonings, other's phrases we can finish ourselves.

So is this the reason for family love? Is this why we keep putting exasperation aside? Is it normal? Is it sane? Is it worthwhile? I don't know. We're social animals, the family unit evolved as a protection mechanism for the young, and when our biological family doesn't suit us we tend to create a family of our choice, out of friends, neighbours, or even the recent entity of social networks.

So I keep my definition of family relationships, if not family love - the inevitable, unchosen relationships. We can terminate them, but we don't choose them in the first place. Because there is also the love that's freely chosen, the one that usually happens between a couple. And I consider myself fortunate to have experienced that, to have once had someone who loved me just because of who I was and in spite of knowing me better than anyone else has before or since. And even if its loss caused me so much pain, I wouldn't trade those years for anything, unless for having being better than I was then, and I wish everybody can live through such an experience.

[sic], by Joshua Cody

Being a doctor, which makes me deal with chronic illness and death all too often, and having lost someone close after a battle with chronic illness, makes me interested in other people's experiences with disease and the prospect of death from illness. As a young and romantically naif adolescent, I used to think of these extreme experiences as enriching and "interesting", until I stumbled on a passage in Thomas Mann's wonderful Magic Mountain, where Setttembrini says to Hans Castorp there's nothing "romantic" or "spiritual" about illness, and then my own experience - quite extended by now - has always confirmed his wise words.

But of course illness and the prospect of imminent death are a kind of cathartics, catalysts, that bring out the best and the worst in us, as other extreme experiences / ordeals. And that's why I always find it fascinating to know how intelligent people live through it, and tell their experiences.

I first heard of [sic] through a review in The Guardian, it caught my attention and I ordered it from Amazon. It's a very good book. Joshua Cody is sometimes too wordy, expatiating too much on not that relevant cultural details, often bordering on pretentiousness, trying to put too much in his narrative; one sometimes feel there are lots of thing that could have been left out, that are unduly cluttering the story. But still it's a powerful and moving memoir, of someone who survived an extremely dire situation, and one can read that very excess of details as the need to express "everything", because he was on the verge of death and managed somehow to survive and tell the tale.

The writing is mostly very good, and he is very insightful and observant. And his frequent cultural asides à la Chatwin, even if somewhat overused, are a joy to read to a pretentious dilletante like myself. All in all, I liked it, and I leave a few excerpts that struck me the most. Anyway, the book speaks for itself.

What do I mean by "happiness"? I don't mean exultant, radiant, manic joy - although there's nothing wrong with that. And I knew I would have those moments again. If I made it out of all this alive, for example. That would be exciting, ecstatic even. What I had the sense I would miss, forever - and I think I may even have been right - are those sudden, uncued moments of inexplicable, profound, unexcited contentment.

The guilt of the ill - especially the guilt of those who have done nothing to help create their state - is a theme on which we've touched, and on which we're sure to touch again, but for now consider the interesting notion that if a person finds himself or herself in a situation for no reason, he or she will go to quite extraordinary lengths to create a reason. [...] I am not responsible for my illness, nor was I ever responsible; rape victims are not responsible for being raped; civilians whoa are captured and tortured by despots as a show of power are not responsible for being captured and tortured; we should have learned this by now.

The crystalline clarity of this morphine delusion proves, perhaps, the Nietzschean maxim that "some situations are so bad that to remain sane is insane".

And here this text was intended as a riposte to the literature of disease, so many of those books I read at the beginning of the whole thing and none of them any help, pure dreck, pale pastel book after book, each one the same, the three-act structure of (I) diagnosis, and (II) the discovery of how beautiful life actually is and how there's more to it than my hedge fund job ever told me it was and look at how lovely this flower is and this butterfly and this herbal tea, and (III) recovery and a book deal and getting a little place in Vermont maybe. If there are some who require disease to teach them such things then fine, but I am not, was not, one of those, thank you very much. I loved life and found beauty and sources of pleasure in things on the outside and on the inside, and illness was not an opportunity for existential awakenings, it was the very opposite of beauty or grace, it was a harrowing, a descensus: and then went down. The principle emotions were terror and above all rage.

So yes there is a rebirth and I'm not saying the whole thing was worth it, but of course, to be alive again, to at least not be probably dying in this present moment for two years, to have reacquired the resources of the senses and just the pleasures provided by perception, all of this regained: of course there is some sort of renewal.

The Torch in My Ear, by Elias Canetti

The second volume of Elias Canetti's autobiography, after The Tongue Set Free. I liked it very much, more than the first. The author writes extremely well, and we can understand his intellectual growth as a man and a writer. The depiction of the Vienna and Berlin of the 20s is excellent, seen through his keen sense of observation, and I find extremely interesting the way in which he describes the genesis of his book.

Pietá

She doesn’t look like a Mater Dolorosa, and certainly not like a Michelangelo Pietá. She’s a short and plump woman in her sixties, with a wart on her chin and a slight limp. And yet, every time I meet her at a coffee stall at the boat terminal, I see motherly love, and pain. She always greets me warmly, sends her regards to all the hospital staff, and shrugs with a short sentence, like “It’s been over a year already!” or “I remember him every day!”.

I first met her son, let’s call him Oscar, when he walked into my office with his fiancée, a twenty-something type 1 diabetic clerk, average looking, with the usual vascular and renal complications of his disease. In spite of good compliance with his therapy, his disease progressed rapidly and in a few months he was on dialysis. I only saw him again about 2 years later, when serious complications got him into the hospital ward. He looked much older then, and that’s when I met his mother. He had already lost his job and his fiancée. And from that time on, he embarked on an all too familiar downward spiral, that we see so many times, just not usually on such young people. He suffered infection after infection, gangrene, amputation, bowel ischemia… He spent weeks in the hospital, that turned into months. In spite of all the medication, surgery, etc, he got steadily worse. When I watched him by the time he was on parenteral nutrition, I was really impressed, he looked like an old man, or a victim of progeria. And he was a really kind and stoic patient through it all, it made us all in his care heartbroken to look at him. We knew he would die soon, and there was not much we could do to ease his suffering.

And through all those months, this little woman was there beside him. She became a familiar figure at the ward, we all knew her, and felt guilty for not being able to help her son more. There came a time when we were all – including her – wishing he would die quickly to put an end to his sufferings, but his body was young and he put a lot of a fight. Eventually, he died.

I know she has another son, a healthy man with children. But I know that Oscar was unique to her, and she couldn’t have been more supportive. We witnessed her suffering, and I still feel uneasy every time I meet her – couldn’t we have done more for Oscar? Probably not. He was one of those cases in which everything goes wrong. But I can’t help to admire his endurance, and his mother’s love and courage, through all his pains.

3 Poems

There are three poems that seem to define my moods through life, words that I hear in my head so often I know them by heart. The first, by Susan Coolidge, expresses what I feel in the morning, be it a real or a symbolic one, when I get up to face life again and again, the color of my incurable and returning optimism and endurance:

New Every Morning

Every day is a fresh beginning,
Listen my soul to the glad refrain.
And, spite of old sorrows
And older sinning,
Troubles forecasted
And possible pain,
Take heart with the day and begin again.

Then there is the moments of giving up, when I'm tired, exhausted, drained, and all I feel like is closing my eyes in the dark and fall into oblivion, forever. Then it's the second poem, the melancholic words by Christina Rossetti:

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.

And then there is the in between, the poem that expresses my stupid self ever since I first read it at 15, and that is still as true now as then, so like me that I was amazed Fernando Pessoa should have described me so accurately (but later I understood that is the gift of truly great writers and poets):

Tudo que faço ou medito
Fica sempre na metade
Querendo, quero o infinito.
Fazendo, nada é verdade.

Que nojo de mim me fica
Ao olhar para o que faço!
Minha alma é lúdica e rica,
E eu sou um mar de sargaço —

Um mar onde bóiam lentos
Fragmentos de um mar de além...
Vontades ou pensamentos?
Não o sei e sei-o bem.

And then, there a 4th poem, one that I always associate to one person, to something I once had but seems now so far away that it looks like it was another life, or a dream, that I feel I'm not worthy to remember since I blew it so utterly and miserably. And yet... there was a time the words of Emily Dickinson evoke, sometimes painfully but always with a nostalgic sweetness that makes me think maybe I wasn't that worthless all the time:

Is it too late to touch you, Dear?
We this moment knew —
Love Marine and Love terrene —
Love celestial too —

Room, de Emma Donoghue

Uma boa surpresa - Room é um livro excelente, em que a autora consegue criar um narrador de 5 anos credível (mesmo que por vezes o vocabulário e a articulação das ideias pareça demasiado elaborado, apesar do uso de erros gramaticais propositados para aumentar a credibilidade). O Jack de Emma Donoghue não fica atrás de exemplos de outros narradores infantis ou mentalmente perturbados, como a criança com Asperger de Mark Haddon em O Estranho Caso do Cão Morto, o Benji de Faulkner em O Som e a Fúria ou a Antoinette de Jean Rhys em Vasto Mar de Sargaços. O contraste entre o tom infantil, simultaneament ingénuo e perspicaz, com o horror da situação na primeira parte, passada no quarto do título, e a crítica divertida ao mundo moderno da segunda parte, está extremamente bem conseguido e é a base do interesse do livro, que se lê sem parar; a parte da fuga é emocionante. Sem dúvida uma escritora a seguir.

The Discovery of Heaven, de Harry Mulisch

Este é o último livro de autores holandeses que comprei em Amesterdão. Nunca tinha ouvido falar de Harry Mulisch, que morrera dias antes, motivo pelo qual os seus livros estavam expostos por todo o lado; comprei este aconselhado pelo empregado da Waterstone's ("This is his masterpiece"), cujos conselhos aliás foram muito bons, pois gostei dos livros todos que me indicou.

The Discovery of Heaven é de facto muito bom, um tour-de-force em forma de fábula mitológica, ao longo do qual se abordam variados temas, desde a amizade, o acaso, a política, ciência, a 2ª Guerra, etc, etc. Muito bem escrito, repassado de espírito, humor e cultura, de leitura sempre agradável, embora a meu ver a primeira e a última parte sejam de longe as melhores e as intermédias demasiado prolongadas sem grande necessidade. A primeira parte, focada na amizade das duas personagens principais, é excelente, e a última, uma espécie de aventura arqueológica que deixa O Código Da Vinci num chinelo, lê-se de um fôlego. E a parte passada em Roma recordou-me tão vivamente esta cidade - o Panteão, o Campo di Fiori, o Castelo de Sant'Angelo, San Giovanni in Laterano - que fiquei cheio de vontade de voltar, o que espero fazer em Abril.

Another Year, de Mike Leigh

Um filme muito bom de Mike Leigh - forte e emotivo, sobre a solidão e a felicidade do quotidiano, mostrados através do contraste entre a vida simples e realizada de uma família feliz e os seus amigos solitários e disfuncionais. E consegue fazê-lo sem lamechices nem moralismos. Os actores estão excelentes.

Beyond Sleep, de Willem Frederik Hermans

Este foi um dos livros de autores holandeses que não conhecia e que comprei em Amesterdão. Gostei muito - muito bem escrito, num tom irónico e corrosivo, consegue criar de forma extremamente vívida a personalidade do narrador, com quem, mau-grado as suas ideias preconcebidas e a mentalidade crescentemente paranóica, não conseguimos deixar de empatizar e simpatizar, tanto mais quanto mais alienado se torna. O tom é propositadamente casual e simples, reforçando assim a construção da personagem e as descrições das suas desventuras e da Natureza aparentemente idílica mas implacavelmente hostil onde se move. E, em jeito de tragicomédia, o autor trata de forma profunda o tema da ambição intelectual e do medo e frustração da mediocridade, tecendo de passagem uma crítica mordaz às instituições académicas e à crítica literária. Muito bom.

You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, de Woody Allen

Mais um filme "menor" de Woody Allen, no género dos que tem realizado regularmente nos últimos anos. Como habitualmente, mesmo os filmes "menores" de Woody Allen são agradáveis de ver, engraçados e irónicos. A história, mais uma vez, é engenhosa e foca os temas que lhe são caros - o sentido (ou ausência dele) da vida, as consequências mais ou menos inesperadas das nossas escolhas, o absurdo da existência e o seu fascínio. Continua um mestre do diálogo, e os actores são bem escolhidos - neste filme, realce para Gemma Jones e Pauline Collins, que estão uma delícia.

Museu do Oriente

No último fim-de-semana, visitei finalmente o Museu do Oriente. Gostei bastante; a colecção não é uma grande mas parece-me bastante boa. Gostei particularmente das peças japonesas e de Timor-Leste (estas muito poucas mas muito interessantes); as imagens dos biombos japoneses, os desenhos chineses, os inúmeros deuses e cenas mitológicas indianas mereciam mais tempo para descobrir e apreciar detalhes. Em relação à exposição em si, achei a iluminação demasiado fraca e algumas obras, como os biombos, mereciam um espaço maior para serem mais bem apreciadas. Nas exposições temporárias, gostei muito dos desenhos de Graça Morais.

Bons complementos da exposição, e que ajudam a atrair público, são o restaurante com vista sobre a doca, onde se come bem e que não é caro, e a loja do museu. E sabe bem fazer turismo em Lisboa de vez em quando.

Ficam algumas imagens das peças de que mais gostei.

Black Swan, de Darren Aronofsky

Um bom filme, que vale sobretudo pela excelente interpretação de Natalie Portman, pela beleza de várias sequências, muito bem filmadas, pela música e por um certo ambiente claustrofóbico. Achei no entanto o argumento um tanto simplista e previsível, de uma “psicologia” demasiado óbvia, um cruzamento de Showgirls de Paul Verhoeven com Repulsion de Roman Polanski.

The Story of a Marriage, de Andrew Sean Greer

Um livro interessante, de um autor americano relativamente jovem que não conhecia. A história está bem contada, o ambiente dos anos 50 muito bem recriado - fez-me lembrar o filme Far From Heaven, de Todd Haynes. Está muito bem escrito, nomeadamente os vários volte-faces (twists) da narrativa, que reflectem os erros que as personagens vão fazendo ao longo da história sobre as intenções e sentimentos umas das outras.