Monday mood (28)

Sarah Affonso, Retrato de Matilde [Velez Core], 1932.

A Nápoles de Ferrante

Para quem sonha com conhecer a cidade, o ensaio fotográfico do momento.

Monday mood (24)

Ai, as sempre tensas relações entre patrões e trabalhadores. Ai, a força do amor que é fogo e Deus. Mesmo que vejamos este espectáculo, que é a vida, com a curiosidade do acidente, convém se não retirarmos ilações, pelo menos pensarmos sobre o nosso tempo, a nossa humanidade, o futuro.

O futuro

In the years to come, as society grows more complex, the number of nouns available to us may grow exponentially. The diversity of its speakers, not so much.

Alan Burdick, Why nouns slow us down...

Monday mood (23)

Carl Vilhelm Holsoe, Senhora lendo, s/d.

A beleza dos clássicos

In our internet-enabled age of narcissism, where the term ‘beauty’ has been seized by the advertising and cosmetics industries, we might do well to remember the range of the beautiful. In Xenophon’s Memorabilia of 371 BCE, when Socrates is asked if he knows of beauty, he replies confidently: ‘Yes, many things’, because beauty itself is various, found not just in statues or songs. Wrestlers and runners, he explains, can be beautiful, too. This makes sense if you’ve ever watched the arc of a tennis racket as a champion goes to serve, or caught the even, loping stride of a middle-distance runner, a Vitruvian man in motion, everlastingly striving. There can be beautiful gestures, too: the mass gathering of innocents resisting a state that injures or ignores them, or the individual acts of care by which we demonstrate our alertness to a shared future.

Shahidha Bari, The Puzzle of Beauty.

Just surviving, just doing

James Wood says Fitzgerald “proceeds with utmost confidence that she will be heard and that we will listen, even to her reticence. Her fictions sit on the page with the well-rubbed assurance of fact, as if their details were calmly agreed upon, and long established.” I think maybe the how of what she does springs from the sort of certainty that comes from just surviving—the knowledge that sometimes, just doing, just being, is all that’s left.

 Lynn Steger Strong sobre a companhia que Penelope Fitzgerald lhe faz todos os dias, aqui.