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Arquivo para a ‘on-line libraries sharing’ Categoria

War and peace

30 Aug

I read a recent commentary on Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) that another Russian writer Ivan Turgenev claimed that knowing and reading Tolstoy is better than reading hundreds of works of ethnography and history” to know the character and temperament of the Russian people, conservatives such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) who came to be considered his successor, and Vladimir Lenin leader of the Soviet revolution who considered him one of the greatest Russian writers.

Many of his books were for the cinema, recently (2012) Anna Karenina was rewritten for the cinema, under the direction of Joe Wright, and was nominated for an Oscar and won the best costume design, but a masterpiece by Tolstoy is the book War and Peace.

From War and Peace I remember impressions and some loose phrases, and the context of the book that talks about the tsarist wars of their context and time, but which is revealing of Russian thinking about war, and that its scourges are not ignored.

The book deals with the lives of 5 aristocratic families, in the period from 1805 to 1820, in the midst of the march of Napoleonic troops and their brutal impact on the lives of hundreds of characters.

There are figures such as the brothers Natasha and Nikolai Rostóv, Prince Andrei Bolkónsky and Pierre Bezúkhov, the illegitimate son of a count whose spiritual quest serves as a kind of thread in the novel and transforms him into a complex and intriguing character of the 20th century. XIX, and whose pursuit will be a complement to peace in the midst of war.

A kind of refuge similar to the book-stealing Girl, which in this case is in the context of Nazi Germany and she will find in the books a refuge for the dark environment of the rise of Nazism in Germany.

I see a common feature in these two books, which is this “refuge”, something between the spiritual and the reader, but both manage to create, in a suffocatingly hateful environment, gaps and spaces of peace and spiritual elevation.

If war comes, what will be our refuge, at what level of spiritual life and knowledge do we want to put our lives that will be at risk, I believe these are contemporary readings.

TOLSTOI, L. (1889) WAR AND PEACE, transl. Nathan Hskell Dole, NY: Ed. Thomas V. Crowell & Co.

 

The human and divine ascension

27 May

There are many exercises and forms that promise asceticism, ways of maintaining physical and mental energies are useful and important, but the spiritual ascent, which is the source of true asceticism, requires moral, ethical, personal and collective training that puts us in a virtuous circle.

When criticizing modern society, as a society of fatigue, Byung Chul Han reminds us that active life must be complemented with a contemplative life, which does not mean looking at infinity or the sky, it is meditation and the collective exercise of including the Another is knowing how to listen from an inner emptiness, or, as philosophy thinks, a phenomenological epoché.

He introduces contemplation as: “If sleep is the high point of physical rest, deep boredom is the high point of spiritual rest. Pure restlessness generates nothing new” (Han, 2015) and then defines it as: “Modern Cartesian doubt dissolves astonishment. The contemplative capacity is not necessarily linked to being imperishable. Precisely the oscillating, the inapparent or the elusive are only open to a deep, contemplative attention” (idem), therefore it is not a tactical exercise but a “astonishment”.

We say that it is phenomenological because of what follows the definition: “In the contemplative state, in a way, we go out of ourselves, diving into things”, this reminds Husserl “returns to the things themselves” without pre-definitions or pre-concepts, a true epoché .

After the astonishment, rest: “Without this contemplative recollection, the gaze wanders restlessly from here to there and brings nothing to manifest. But art is an “expressive action” (Ibid.), and without it our civilization, he says, quoting Nietzsche: “For lack of rest, our civilization is heading towards a new barbarism. At no other time were the active, that is, the restless, worth so much.”

This restlessness proves the wars, the most atrocious political disputes, mockery instead of dialogue and the careful analysis of social proposals and needs, there is no “rest” for this to be done.

The divine ascension, after the Christian asceticism that comes to passion and death, our civilization seems to go through this as a whole, angels appear who ask the disciples who are looking to heaven (Acts 1, 10-11): “… heaven as Jesus ascended. Then two men dressed in white appeared, who said to them, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand here looking up at the sky? This Jesus who was taken to heaven for you will come in the same way as you saw him leave for heaven”, they stopped a moment before “amazement” and “rest”.

The barbarism of the pandemic, the war and a food shortage that is announced demands “astonishment”, accept that the mystery exists and that the universe had an origin.

HAN, B.-C. (2015) A Sociedade do Cansaço. Brazil, Petrópolis: Vozes. (pdf)

 

Non-violence and agape

13 May

The story told to this day is a story of power, where lack of respect reigns and that is why agápe love seems something altruistic and heroic, and it is, but it is more than that, it is the security of a more peaceful, safer humanity. where nations and peoples can freely express their culture.

Byung-Chul Han recalls that the first word of the Iliad for man is menin (anger): “the first word of the Iliad is menin, namely cholera, [Z or n] . ‘Sing, goddesses, the wrath of Achilles, son of Peleus’, thus begins the first narrative of Western culture” (HAN, 2018, p. 22)

Remember right from the start that only respect is symmetrical (reciprocal): “Power is an asymmetrical relationship. It is based on a hierarchical relationship. The power of communication is not dialogic. Unlike power, respect is not necessarily an asymmetrical relationship.” (Han , 2018, p. 18), so there can only be agape, a reciprocity of love without interests and without conditioning, if respect and love without interests are learned.

Similarly, Joyce’s Ulysses begins with “Buck” Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus in the Martello tower (photo) at dawn on June 16, 1906, the subject is Haines Mulligan’s guest and uncomfortable for Stephen, they argue between the lines, this goes unnoticed. for many interpreters, the Protestant philosophy of unionists (those who want Ireland united with England) and Catholics who want independent Ireland, which Stephen aligns with.

Mulligan ironically calls him a Jesuit, and it is right at the beginning of part I: “He raised the (shaving) vase and intoned: – Introibo ad altere dei. Stopping, he peered down the dark spiral staircase and called out harshly: – Climb, Kinch, Climb, execrable Jesuit” (Joyce, 1983, p. 6).

Philosopher Han begins his book on what mass culture is today, the culture of “shitstorm”, mass bullying, or literally: “Respect is attached to names. Anonymity and respect are mutually exclusive. The anonymous communication that is provided by digital media greatly deconstructs respect. Shitstorm is also anonymous” (HAN, 2018, p. 14).

Byung-Chul Han believes that a society of the future is possible from this current massification where the idea of war and hatred are still present, but will change: “The society of the future will have to rely on a power, the power of the masses. ” (Han, 2018, p. 25).

Byung-Chul Han believes that a society of the future is possible from this current massification where the idea of war and hatred are still present, but will change: “The society of the future will have to rely on a power, the power of the masses. ” (Han, 2018, p. 25).

A mass power must be peaceful and solidary, wars are vertical power disputes.

It is not a question of defining a superstructure of power and a logic of state, but a new and true agapic humanism, one that can be defined as the divine love of the “new Christian commandment (Jn 13, 33-34): “Little children, for I am still with you for a little while. 34 I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also ought to love one another.”

HAN, Byung-Chul.(2018) No Enxame: perspectivas do digital. (In swarm: perspectives of the digital). Brazil, São Paulo: trans. Lucas Machado. Ed, Vozes, 2018.

Joyce, J. (1983) Ulysses. Trad. Antonio Houaiss, Portugal: Difel. pdf

 

 

A reading of Ulysses´s Joyce

12 May

It may seem complicated for an unsuspecting reader to read James Joyce’s Ulysses, first its division that claims to have connections with Homer’s Ulysses, so for example Telemachy (part 1, chapters 1 to 3) focuses on characters (Telêmachus was the son of Ulysses) and Odyssey (part II, chapters 4 to 15) is the development of the action that takes place all of it on June 16, 1904, as we already posted after a friends party with Joyce became Bloomsday .

In part I, it’s eight o’clock in the morning at the Hammer Tower, where Stephen (Bloom’s son) lives with Buck Molligan, an Englishman Haines friend of Mulligan is present, they discuss the art, which is the backdrop for their ethical positions. : the tension between the two is because Stephen of an art integrates and that despises the (social) concessions for recognition, while Mulligan sees an art that gives in to social pressure supported by Haines who intends to study the renaissance in Irish Literature and admires the folklore , however it turns out to be anti-Semitic, part of the xenophobia that the Blooms suffer from the origin of their father Leopold Bloom, who is a Jewish-Hungarian immigrant.

Stephen sees Haines as the colonizer as Irish-England unionism dominates the conservative Irish landscape of the early 20th century, while Stephen defends independence although he sees Irish provincialism as small and is also critical of his Catholicism.

Proteus (god of the seas and son of Ocean in Greek mythology) reveals Stephen’s reflection on the visible and the invisible, the objective world as signs that require interpretation (and contextualization), the transformation of everything in time and space, in mind. It develops here subliminally the themes of mother, woman and fertility, Amor Filia.

In Calypso the novel goes to Rua Eccles, n. 7 where Leopold Bloom has his breakfast and prepares it for himself, his wife and the cat, he decides to eat pork kidney and goes to the butcher shop to buy it, on the way he sees a woman who awakens daydreams, returns home collects the mail and sees a letter from daughter Milly, another from Blazes Boylan addressed to Molly.

Blazes had organized a concert tour for Molly and he suspects that the woman is cheating on him with Blazes, eats the roasted kidney, goes to the bathroom and outside the house reads a newspaper. This chapter prepares an incarnation and Odysseus, Stephen’s spiritual father, the inner monologue prevails, but now the daydream goes to the problems of Zionism and eroticism, on the whole, is a space of Eros Love.

Bloom reads a letter addressed to Henry Flower, his pseudonym, the name refers to the flowering of the sexual desire that emerges (the direct correspondence in Homer is with the lotophagous (picture), the people who eat lotus and who are a region of danger in the Odyssey), finally reveals Bloom’s moral strain.

At the end of this topic is Molly in bed, reflecting on her husband, her meeting with Boylan, her past, her hopes, she too suspects a lover of her husband, aspires to a great future, is interrupted twice by the train whistle (a kind of time passing) and another for a start of menstruation, she thinks of the doctor, her children Stephen and the deceased, she remembers the first sex with Bloom.

There are ethical and aesthetic concerns, especially with Stephen in the book, which sets the stage for early 20th century Ireland, but there is an absence of Agape Love, except in Stephen’s conception of art, and this is the connection that James Joyce tries to make. between his Ulysses and Homer’s.

Joyce, J.  (1983) Ulysses, Trad. António Houaiss. Portugal: Difel. (pdf)

 

Injustice and arrogance

03 Nov

Those who practice injustices need to deviate life from its natural course, they need to change humanism to turn it into something perverse, it is necessary to influence the culture, remove from it what is beautiful and pleasant, disrespect the poor and helpless and confuse the soul with desires for power and greed.

Few men seek to deviate from these traps, with this the idea that a “successful” person means they were lucky, blessed or fought a lot dominates common sense, but they ignore people and perverse structures that favor them, and perhaps the majority of them is the power structure, that is why it is a source of polarization.

Throughout history, only the winners told their glories, “to the Winner the potatoes” says the character Quincas Borba (picture) in Machado de Assis’ novel, where he develops the idea of ​​humanitas, which sees war as a way of selecting the fittest, thus it justifies the oppression and impoverishment of the wronged.

The character Quincas Borba is a kind of atheist philosopher, who became rich when he inherited the property of an old uncle, a resident of Barbacena, State of Minas Gerais, where he spent some time in this city before dying.

The one who will enjoy the fortune left by Quincas Borba will be Rubião, a modest inhabitant of the interior of Minas Gerais, who receives his fortune and decides to live in Rio de Janeiro. who go in search of work, but of the rich who go in search of a good life.

Rubião goes to the city and will try to apply the philosophy of Humanitas developed by Quincas Borba and this is actually the theme of the book.

In addition to the literary and historical aspect of the novel, characteristic of the time (the novel Quincas Borba was first published in 1891), Rubião, while enjoying an easy fortune, is a victim of the provincial credulity of which his friends who welcome him in the “big city” they will enjoy.

The theme is universal, even if painted in Brazilian historical colors, in addition to the injustices towards the poor and the destitute, the tricks and machinations that also take away the possessions of people who, having earned easy money, do not know how to use it well and get lost in the traps set by miserly false friends.

Among the Christian beatitudes is that dedicated to those who hunger and thirst for justice, “because they will be satisfied” (Mt 5:6).

 

 

Three books (or 4)to read in 2021

06 Jan

I always propose to read some books in the year that begins, differently this year I feel more stimulated by the romance-fiction that inspired the film “O midnight sky” the book that is being translated into Portuguese by Lily Brooks -Dalton, is a reinterpretation of a collapsed land that has already appeared in other fictions such as Interstellar (2014), Gravity (2014) and the epic Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Ad Astra (2019).

The second book is “Praise the Earth” by Byung Chul Han, it explores its oriental character almost of love for plants, of care, praise and gratitude, it is a garden that was given to the author for this care, making known another face of a writer, the synthetic and realistic relationship with nature.

He explores the rhythms and relationships of aromas with nature, exploring the subtlety of plants and flowers, which is an invitation to contemplation.

The third book is by Peter Sloterdijk (I already ordered the book) You must change your life, whose edition in Portuguese is from the publisher Relógio d´Água.

Peter Sloterdijk developed a philosophy from the book Rules for the human park, deepened in Critique to Cynical Reason and in the 3 volumes of his spheres (I only read the first, the others do not have a Portuguese version), in which he fights a battle against a failed humanism.

In this work You must change your life (in Germany it was launched in 2009, in Portugal last year) the philosopher takes up the question in which he seeks an anthropology in a non-literary or enlightenment dimension of the context of life, in an interview with Fronteiras do Pensamento, in 2016, stated about his anthropotechnics (the central theme of this book), he defines the human being not as creativity, but as a repetition of creativity.

He said in the interview: “the French word répétition expresses repetition at the same time, putting on stage actions that we have already produced, and the exercise that prepares a performance, a performance. Think of a musical or artistic repetition, making and repeating are terms that in French – unlike what happens in German – converge.

And it is exactly on this convergence that the work of anthropotechnics is concentrated”.

A fourth option is possible, the book of logotherapy by Viktor Frankl The meaning of life, its is widely read in Brazil.

 

Babette’s feast

08 Oct

Babette´s feast is one of Karen Blixen’s most celebrated tales (1885–1962), tells the story of two puritanical ladies, daughters of a Protestant pastor, who live a very oppressive life until her father dies, the tale became famous after being filmed by the Danish director, being the first Blixen film to be filmed by the Danish Film Institute , and the first to win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

The script was adapted by Just Betzer, Bo Christensen and Benni Korzen, in it Filippa (Bodil Kjer) and Martine (Birgitte Federspiel) are daughters of the strict Lutheran shepherd, who after his death, appears in the village Babette (Stéphane Audran), a Parisian who offers to be the cook and cleaning lady of the family.

Many years after working in the house, she receives the news that she won a big lottery prize and offers to prepare a French gala dinner in celebration of the pastor’s 100th birthday, the parishioners initially fearful, accept babette’s banquet.

The symbolism of the film is strong, the shades of blue slightly contrasted, are on the border between heaven and earth is almost imperceptible, amid the gray landscape of Denmark, a first image foreshadows a different communion in a place between earthly and heavenly things.

Another aspect of symbology is the fish, very influential in early Christianity, but it is the table that was able to re-connect those people with a true self, and awaken them again a sense for the life they had lost some time ago.

The dance of the participants around the people (photo), also a religious symbology, is a high point of this resumption of meaning of the lives of those people.

What Babette’s art, the food made with love and art, was to create on the table a “kind of loving involvement”, but “in a loving involvement of that noble and romantic category in which the person no longer distinguishes between appetite or satiety, bodily and spiritual!”, as the author of the original play herself describes, Blixen thus expresses the deepest of his expression in this tale.

 

 

The golden book

11 Mar

Written in 1962 and considered one of the great novels of the 20th century, the Golden Book (O Caderno Dourado in Spanish, in the photo), tells the story of Anna Wulf, a writer immersed in a personal crisis who decides to tell her story, from the black book for his literary life when he lived in South Africa, the red book on his left-wing political activism, the yellow his emotional life and the blue his daily life.
Doris Lessing, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature at the age of 85 (2007) when she expected nothing more, herself made a joke about it, but the recognition was deserved and little is known today of this consequent feminist and who refused to adhere to fashions and conjunctures followed his struggle.
Themes such as friendship, motherhood and sexuality have much deeper tones and outlines in this author, in novels such as “As grandmothers” (2007) where old age is seen in a different light, especially for women, or about politics in its book “The sweetest dream” that she suggests as an autobiographical one, and that reflects deeply on her humanitarian vision.
But if I had to highlight a novel by her, my favorite of the youth “Prisons we choose to live in” (1987), it attacks in a subtle and extraordinary way the question of political rhetoric (or what was decided to be politically correct) where it instigates individuals to come out of social constraints and build a better world, in fact and above everyday fashion.
He does not fail to attack in this novel ignorance and the lack of personal responsibility in the desire for applause and mere repetition of mottos, how current his speech would be, anticipating the times, because it was precisely because of the excess of rhetoric and the absence of concrete acts that we fell into pitfalls and we help contemporary ignorance and demagogy.
His sentence that seems to sum up his thinking was: “I cannot and will not hurt my conscience just to adhere to the fashion of the day”, and he said this not for conservatives, but for the apparently advanced positions of his time that were not directed towards attitudes concrete.

 

Doll´s house

10 Mar

Written in 1878 and built in 1879, the Norwegian novel by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) is one of the first manifestations of the exclusion of women in a dualistic and macho society, made for the theater had its first staging in the Kongelige theater, Copenhagen, Denmark , already in 1879.

The romance caused quite a stir at the time, however Ibsen was from a wealthy and respected family in the city of Skien, Norway, and is considered one of the founders of modernism.

The setting is the Christmas season, and the couple Nora and Torvard Helmer are getting ready for the party, and he comments on the expenses of the woman, which she treats with nicknames that reduce her childishness: “lark”, “squirrel” and “ my little girl ”like a bad boy who still knows little about adult life.

In Picture two filme from the 70´s, Jane Fonda and Claire Bloom interpret Nora Helmer.

In the first act a widowed woman Cristina Linde and Dr. Rank arrive, who go to the office to talk to Holmer while Cristina who is a former colleague of Nora’s, talks about the death of the husband of Cristina, Holmer’s former colleague. While Holmer goes to the office with his friend, Nora and colleague Cristina talk about their personal lives.

Nora says that her husband will receive the position of manager in an investment bank and this will bring stability to the family, while Cristina also treats her as a “grown child”.

The doorbell rings again and the maid announces Mr. Krogstad, who comes to talk about business with the bank in Helmer’s new position, Cristina recognizes him as having “business of all kinds”, Dr. Rank leaves the office and comes to the room and also knows Mrs. Linde.

When Nora is alone with Mr. Krogstad who had made him a loan, and Mr. Holmer did not know, about the period when the family was in bad finances, Mr. Krogstad tells him that he knows that her father’s signature as guarantor it was falsified because it was 3 days after his death, and here the novel enters its plot.

Cristina actually had an affair with Mr. Krogstad and she can help Nora, resuming the relationship with Krogstad, he sends the promissory note to Holmer but had already sent a letter saying of the loan that his wife had made with him by forging her father’s signature.

The ending is surprising, Holmer opens Krogstad’s letter that tells the “secret of the loan”, then he receives the promissory note and tears it up, but reconciliation with Nora was already impossible because he had said harsh words about her loan.

And in the end Nora leaves, leaving them with her children, whom he said he had no capacity for and educating them, undoubtedly a shocking novel for the time, and which received harsh criticism.

 

 

 

 

Priest Manuel Antunes and the State

06 Nov

Before rethinking the state, Antunes departs from Portugal, after delineating in the first pages the identity and fragilities of the people, without leaving the chauvinism or isolationism that was characteristic of a post-colonial period, says the thinker: “It is easy to on paper dozens and dozens of political parties. It is easy to make ideological proclamations as if they contain the ultimate and ultimate truth. It is easy to point out programs, innumerable and ideal, but that do not bite in the real “(Antunes, 2011, 38), highlights them once and for all.
It is going to rethink the Portuguese state, as it says “leaving the country we are”, not being possible to put aside: “our most serious problems: the Overseas, the emigration, the multiple delays that affect us in the political, social, economic, scientific, technological and cultural “(ibid., 38), stating that” for fifty years we lived in the hypertrophy of the State “, and this is valid not only in Europe but also in many state models contemporaries.
After parading the functions of the state, it will develop two lines of reflection on two opposing models: “a great line of cleavage rises before us: that separates the monopolist state from the pluralist state” (page 42), in which Brazil will also learn the lesson.
He says of the first: “radically centralizing, bureaucratic, jurisdictional and, at least, totalitarian,” he says of the lesson learned on May 25, that not even his supporters wanted to defend him, it may be said that he was already dead.
The second is: “the second radically decentralizing, taking the nation and society as they are with their inter vivos bodies truly alive, their social strata organizing themselves in the way that suits them and leaving to the free play of the market” , seems better and less bureaucratic, but “between these two extremes lies a wide range in which various combinations are possible” (page 43) is where he develops his ideas.
It will be called “temperate zones” in which “man can build an existence
more in accordance with its nature of being intelligent and free “(idem).
He then asks whether Portugal wants to live in this temperate zone, where the “ideological-affective principle of freedom, equality and fraternity, constantly in a critical review instance in its concrete applications and not reduced to an empty slogan or mere rhetorical discourse without content” which in many places gave rise not only to democratic discredit, but mainly.