Arquivo para a ‘on-line libraries sharing’ Categoria
Coldness: from essence to appearance
18
Apr
Empathy, patience, true love and true feelings seem distant, bodies adorned,
made up and tattooed, minds distant and cold, empty and lacking in inspired ideas.
I read in the book “The book thief” (2005): “perhaps this is a fair punishment for those who do not have a heart: only realizing this when you can no longer go back”, is a harsh sentence, but it was important to analyze my social, personal and friendship context.
My inspiration to read, write and search within institutions, environments and social media for something intelligent, inspired and sweet, productive where I can find different paths from what I see and feel around me, made me understand and admire Markus Zusak’s book, at least unless I remember the 2013 edition (year of film), she was looking for a refuge, an escape from the contextual situation.
I wonder if this situation about the tension of a possible large-scale war is different, I see a lot of hypocrisy and manipulation in the air, while innocent people die in a stupid war, others prepare for an even bigger confrontation that slowly spreads across the globe.
I remember a biblical passage (Thessalonians 1,5:3) when they say: “There is peace and security, then sudden destruction will come upon them, like birth pangs on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape”, but for those in a hurry I remember that it is written that this will not mean the end.
Sincere efforts for peace are lacking, armed spirits cannot promote any peace, they want allies for their temporal power, a timeless message is lacking, beyond immediate interests.
This is how hearts walk, and schools and the everyday life of the simplest and most fleeting life have already arrived, I saw a housewife from a small town excited in the supermarket speaking against that politician who ruined everything and a child who cried over a political situation that I didn’t quite understand.
You can’t put out a fire with gasoline, says popular wisdom, but poetry is no longer in the air, there are no songs that speak of pure love, only immediate interests of an erotic drive, in a society that actually lives “The agony of Eros”, a profound book by Byung Chul Han.
It is not a certain popular singer who speaks against teaching and good education, society echoes these hymns and there is almost no way to succeed without emotional and passionate appeals out of tune.
The dismantling of the human vision as Being and its transformation into the utilitarian vision of Having had a historical origin in Western thought and now penetrates and tries to destroy its meaning.
Zusak, Markus. (2005) The book Thief. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Between death and non-death
22
Mar
Recovering the concept of a life well lived is one that can be examined, and one must live it to the end, 
there is another issue that is the gaps in life or what I call the intermittents of death, in reference to what Saramago described in “The Intermittence of Death”, see the post.
If we posted there about the intermittent, here we want to talk about non-death, to address non-life, Saramago’s exercise is to think of a country or fictional place where, for a few days, no death was reported, and he goes further thinking of a situation in which people could know in advance of death, after some reflections, think:
“In theory it seemed like a good idea, but practice would not take long to demonstrate that it was not so much. Imagine a person, one of those who enjoy splendid health, those who have never had a headache, optimists by principle and for clear and objective reasons, and who, one morning, leaving home for work, finds the helpful postman from his area, who says to him, Glad to see you, Mr. So-and-so, I have a letter for you, and immediately sees a violet-colored envelope appear in his hands that perhaps he had not yet paid special attention to …” (p. .123) and receives early news of his death.
He thinks he will be able to avoid stepping on a banana peel, not receiving the letter, throwing it away, but someone will politely bring it back thinking he has forgotten it, finally at the apex of the story he finds it fatal.
If in the previous post the “intermittents” were not clear, here the card is this personification, death made Being not only points to an allegorical discourse, but one can see it as it is.
Then he writes: “Death, where was your victory, knowing, however, that you will not receive an answer, because death never answers. and it’s not because he doesn’t want to, it’s just because he doesn’t know what to say in the face of the greatest human pain” (pp. 123-124).
The speech may seem strange, but only those who follow it can understand that its pure personification brings the understanding that there is something beyond life and not just finitude, this is what bothers Saramago, but he does not give in until he reaches his opposite, which is to accept it as fatal
The personification of death letter and the narrative merge, this is an essential element to understand Saramago’s tale, although he does not refer to it when he says in the cellist’s apartment: “Then something never seen before happened, something not imaginable, death left -If she fell to her knees, she was all of her, now, a body rebuilt, that’s why she had knees, and legs, and feet, and arms, and hands, and a face that was hidden between her hands, and shoulders that trembled you don’t know why, it won’t be crying, you can’t ask so much of someone who always leaves a trail of tears wherever he goes, but none of them are yours.” (p. 152).
Even if it is, in my way of seeing the reverse of life, Saramago remakes the sensible and the finite.
SARAMAGO, Jose. (2005) Intermitências da morte ( Intermittents of death). Brazil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
The Machine Learning
01
Mar
Trend Even from the 21st century artificial intelligence 
was in a great crisis, could do a lot of logical reasoning, treat and rationalize equations, make inferences, but the volume of “human” data was small, the emergence of the Web and the adhesion of billions. of people enabled a new scenario: Big Data, a large amount of human data.
This large and complex data can be processed with large-scale accurate results, so that it can be processed by machine so that the machine “learns” trends, this (not by) machine learning is called “Machine Learning”.
With this it is possible to identify opportunities and avoid mistakes such as insisting on “logical” discourses but out of trend, it is not a question of going into fashion, but rather identifying it to correct it or propose other alternatives, and that is the opportunities Real.
Big data identifies data patterns, creates and analyzes the connections between them, and makes the execution of a given also smarter, whether or not it can rely on human supervision. In these two types, supervised and unsupervised, machine “learning” will always be essential, in supervised there is human interaction controlling the input and output of data and thus directly interfering with machine training, while in unsupervised algorithms use deep learning to handle and solve complex tasks without human intervention.
An important algorithm for semantic searches was made by a GitHut team: Hamel Husain. Ho-Hsiang Wu and Tiferet Gazit, and two Microsoft researchers: Miltiadis Allamanis and Marc Brockschmidt, who assess the state of evolution of semantic search algorithms and even make the code available through the GitHub site.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.09436v1.pdf
Anger and social issues
15
Feb
One of the strongest arguments for anger is the social issue, before economic, now cultural
and ethnic.
The book by the American John Steinbeck, caused a great malaise in society, was cited with a certain reverence when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 although the book is from 1939, the book was well received in Soviet Eastern Europe at the time and in the Scandinavian countries.
At the time, the book was burned in public squares and banned from schools, it was the beginning of the cold war and McCarthyism (persecution of communists in the USA), although the author never had an affiliation.
The book begins with Tom Joad, the central character of the book, asking for a ride after 7 years in prison which was his sentence for having murdered someone as a result of a bar fight, even though it was in his self-defense he ended up being declared guilty.
He finds nothing in his old house and ends up discovering that they had sold all the belongings and going to Uncle John’s house and getting there he realizes that everyone is ready to leave and discovers that the big companies and farms are closed and the farmers are leaving to California to look for work.
It is the period of the great American depression, and social issues are emerging, the book shows the conditions of work and exploration in the fields of fruit plantations in California, Steinbeck is from the Salinas region, where the novel takes place, which although fiction has a connection with the region.
The question is how far can the limits of this type of revolt go, is it just violence and ideological struggles when these conditions are present, what are the alternatives to the problems, is it likely that we will enter a new recession, in addition to the risk of war, the book by Steinbeck gives us a similar scenario (recession and war) and may point us not to a return to the past, but to a new possibility for the dark future that awaits us.
Steibeck, John. (1939). The grapes of wrath. First edition: New York Viking, 1939.
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.
