Aprender dá-se na construção de relações, que são troca e dádiva, que passam pelo que vem dos outros e retorna aos outros, a linguagem. Por isso, quando se abdica de ensinar para dar lugar exclusivo ao trino de faculdades de adaptação ao desenvolvimento tecnológico, a aprendizagem, que deve permitir aos jovens implicar-se no mundo pela atenção à sua multiplicidade, é posta em risco.
Silvina Rodrigues Lopes, "Do ensino como ofício inquieto".
[Isabela Figueiredo] viveu este ano e o confinamento muito zangada, com raiva e revolta. "Com vontade de processar o governo português se tivesse dinheiro. Porque estou presa em casa. Porque politicamente tudo isto deveria ter sido gerido de forma a proteger os frágeis, mas deixar a liberdade e a autonomia sob a responsabilidade daqueles que podem ser responsáveis. Ou seja, gostaria de não ser tratada de forma paternalista como tenho sido até agora. Não quero que haja um jornalista na televisão a dizer-me 'tenham noção'. Não quero ser tratada dessa forma nem por jornalistas, Presidentes da República ou primeiro-ministros."
Ouvir aqui.
Fico cheia de uma tristeza negra quando me dou conta de que há jovens adultos que ao lerem um texto mais elaborado - com um vocabulário mais invulgar ou uma estrutura mais apaladada - não percebem rigorosamente nada. Nada. É como se estivessem a ler uma língua estrangeira. Essa incapacidade ser-lhes-á sempre uma desvantagem grande. Eu creio saber onde está a culpa mas não me apetece dizer. Mas fico triste e tenho pensamentos amaríssimos. São gerações que vêm dos domínios da parataxe e das frases começadas por "é assim" e das despedidas terminadas por "boa continuação". Vêm dos pontos de exclamação em barda e dos lugares-comuns. Vêm do kitsch e olham todo o cuidado como um excesso exótico ou um preciosismo que rejeitam. Só eu sei a amargura que isto me dá.
Ivone Mendes da Silva, O Fulgor Instável das Magnólias.
E como lidei eu com tudo isto? E por que razão, quando atacado, tão raramente falei ou pareci demasiado perturbado? Bem, tendo em conta o caos maligno de um universo sem objetivos, o que é uma pequena alegação falsa no grande esquema das coisas? Segundo, ser um misantropo tem as suas vantagens — as pessoas nunca podem desiludir-me.Já está aí a autobiografia de Woody Allen. Leitura obrigatória. De nada, por quem sois.
For Penelope Fitzgerald, memories began at Balcombe, in a 'homely-mock Tudor house with a lawn and a cherry tree'. Late in life, she remembered it as an idyll: the flowering cherry and the walnut tree outside her window, her secret hiding place between the double rose hedge, the rabbit that was always getting lost, the low murmuring of the hens, the baker delivering bred in his pony-trap [...].
Vivi muito com ele, mais do que normalmente uma criança vive com o avô. A sua atitude comigo foi uma maiêutica. Ensinou-me a descobrir, a amar e a admirar. Mas ensinou-me também a escolher e a criticar. Ele dizia: "Nem todos os intelectuais são inteligentes." Com ele aprendi a rejeitar os exageros, o pedatismo e o cabotinismo (...)
Publication of a complete edition of Plath’s letters has been long overdue. Until now, apart from fleeting quotations in biographies and critical studies of Plath, the only letters available to readers outside of archives appear in Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975). Edited by Plath’s mother as a corrective to the negative portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship in The Bell Jar(U.S. publication 1971), Letters Home is terribly flawed. Consisting primarily of letters from Plath to her mother, the book offers fascinating glimpses of Plath’s daily life but a cartoonish view of her as a person. Ellipses pepper every page, and, as comparison to the originals in The Letters of Sylvia Plath shows, Aurelia Plath made extreme cuts throughout, rarely reprinting full versions of anything but postcards (and she often severely redacted those, too). The book perplexed readers, for neither the letters, in which Plath strives to maintain a pose of peppy optimism, nor Aurelia Plath’s often defensive editorial commentary, reflected the Plath readers thought they knew from the poetry and fiction. Gone were the barbed emotions, the volatile wit, the interior darkness. Instead, Plath appears as the ambitious Smith “all-around” girl, rewarded for her hard work with prizes, publications, and a dream-come-true marriage—with only a few negative blips along the way to mar her fighting spirit and positive attitude, even after her marriage crumbles.
Accurately foreseeing the book’s mixed reviews, Ted Hughes wrote to Aurelia after reading the manuscript and urged her to rethink her approach, not for the sake of protecting him, he claimed, but because “all these letters exist within a single relationship, and this entails, eventually, beyond a certain critical mass of text, a feeling of monotony and narrowness,” which he attributed to Plath’s “constant and growing and very understandable need to reassure you that the life she had chosen was not a mistake, that writing was succeeding financially etc.” He also suggested cutting “the repetitiousness of mood and response” in Plath’s depiction of life at Smith, and the overabundance of enthusiasm throughout the letters that, he warned, while characteristic of Plath, so suffuses them that “the book begins to produce the opposite effect to what I’m sure you must have hoped. So even much of this evidence of her good spirits must be cut” (16 July 1974, Selected Letters of Ted Hughes).
It’s hard to know how much of this advice Mrs. Plath took. But the points Hughes makes about Letters Home also ring true for large swathes of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Reading through the letters to her mother, which Plath wrote at great length and with great frequency, is a slog, due to the monotony of cheerful affect and the obsessive recounting of what she did when, where, and how. Frank O’Hara’s wry appraisal of his poetry—“I do this, I do that”—applies equally well here—except that O’Hara’s poems are inherently interesting because they happen in New York City, whereas Plath’s letters, until she moves to Cambridge, England, reflect her teen and collegiate life in suburban America. But the difference in reading Letters Home and The Letters of Sylvia Plath, whose first half is dominated by letters to mom, is that the unabridged versions reveal not only how Aurelia’s editing flattens Plath into a caricature of the “all-American girl,” but also how Plath herself carefully curated her experiences to pose as such a girl in order to please her mother.
Some readers may question Steinberg and Kukil’s decision to publish all extant letters. Although Plath kept journals from age eleven onward, The Unabridged Journals (also edited by Kukil) begins the summer before Plath matriculated at Smith. And, whereas Letters Home starts with Plath’s first letter from college, The Letters of Sylvia Plath takes 172 pages to get there. The pre-high school letters, many sent from Girl Scout camp, are especially tedious. Yet they reveal aspects of Plath’s character and style that carry over into adulthood: her healthy appetite (and sensuous interest in food and cooking), her love of nature (and skill in describing it), and her hyper-organization (evident early on in letters about her stamp collection, and remarkably present throughout the volume in the editors’ footnotes referencing her calendar to corroborate activities she mentions). Plath begins enclosing poems in letters at age ten, and by thirteen is already coolly ranking them, a habit she would continue into adulthood when compiling book manuscripts. In November 1945, she confides to a friend, “speaking of poetry I just began a notebook of my poems and already have about 5 real ones, and have about 5 medium and 5 jingles.” She also sketched throughout her life and liberally illustrated her letters with drawings. The editors reproduce a few illustrated letters as plates and take care in the text to describe any drawings Plath added to letters or envelopes. The book opens with gaily decorated letters to her parents and concludes, in the penultimate letter, with news she sends to Aurelia that the Christian Science Monitor has published her article, with four pen-and-ink sketches, about Benidorm, Spain, where she honeymooned with Hughes.
Evident also from early on are Plath’s all-out efforts to please mom. Describing piano practice, she writes with pride to Aurelia, “I kept saying to myself, ‘This is what mother would want me to do’” (January 1943). Hyperbole abounds—“Today in my opinion is the most beautiful day I spent at camp” (8 July 1945); in subsequent letters, summer after summer, year after year, new “most wonderful” days replace the old. The happiness reverberates through high school and crescendos during Plath’s first three undergraduate years. Thus, a summer job at the shore as a mother’s helper (doing nonstop cooking, laundry, housecleaning and watching three children) sounds like summer camp: “Yesterday was just about the most wonderful yet. . . . Nauset is the most beautiful place on the Cape. . . . I don’t know when I’ve had such a wonderful time in all my life. . . . I left her [fiction writer Val Gendron] at 12:30 after 5 of the most wonderful hours I have ever spent” (19–21 August 1952). Three days later, the wonder never ceases: “I don’t know when I’ve had so much work and fun combined! Really, I feel so much richer, older, and wiser after this summer. Never have I gotten along so well with such an amazing diversity of people!” (24 August 1952). Such exuberant over-insistence is hard to tolerate in either edition of Plath’s letters. The problem with Letters Home, however, is that it proposes—or, really, insists—that this saccharine version reflects the “real” Sylvia Plath.
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, in contrast, complicates Plath through showing how meticulously she designed letters—and different versions of herself—for a diversity of recipients. The correspondence with Aurelia so weights the book’s first half that letters to others arise as welcome relief: sudden flarings of a different Plath, more thoughtful and often more caustic, than the happy “Sivvy” of the letters home. In letters to women friends, Plath unleashes her snark about social double standards and the tedium of playing nice girl. For example, after enduring a bad date, she quips, “[he] was supposedly the best-looking boy in his dorm—& he was attractive in a weak-dark hair-tonic sort of way. He was one of those fool Americans who thinks of girls as a clotheshorse with convenient openings and curved structures for their own naïve pleasure” (3 February 1951). She also casts a cold eye on her era’s reverence for female propriety: “After Class Day it was a two hour tea at the headmaster’s house, and I got so damn sick of making small talk with mothers of boys and fiancées and young wives that I thought my sweet girlish smile had frozen to my face. I felt like drowning myself in the iced tea bowl, in a flurry of mint leaves” (12 June 1951). Along with mockery of social conventions, the letters to friends also record her left-leaning, humanistic politics. Her exchanges, beginning in high school with a German pen pal, register Plath’s pacifism, her curiosity about postwar life in Germany, and consciousness of how their generation bears the existential burden of growing up in the atomic age. Occasionally, in letters to Aurelia, Plath breaks good-girl character and gets sarcastic or political—sometimes simultaneously, “No news may be good news from Warren [Plath’s brother], but that doesn’t mean that no news means I’m on my deathbed. If I were, I’d at least have time to drop you a postcard.” Busy with midterms, Plath had last written to mom only two days earlier. She concludes, “It is lovely weather and I am as yet fine. If I live till after March 12 I can face the atombomb with complete equanimity” (3 March 1951). Aurelia did not reprint this postcard in Letters Home, nor did she reprint the passionate, articulate paragraphs from Fall 1952 letters in which Plath opposes McCarthyism, advocates for Civil Rights, and longs to be old enough to vote for Adlai Stevenson (Aurelia supported Eisenhower). In its inclusion of letters to friends, as well as to family, and in restoring all of the passages Aurelia suppressed in Letters Home, The Letters of Sylvia Plath resuscitates Plath’s political consciousness and her snark, including her capacity for self-satire.
We are the way we are, we’re framed by our parents and the particular set of anxieties – social, political, and others that we have – so that one begins to feel we’re all carrying around a very fixed inheritance; as if there’s a bottle that’s filled up, or half filled up, or a quarter filled up at our birth and that level never changes, which is a terrible thing. That can’t be true, can it?
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Paul Child/The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Julia on the telephone. Aubazine, France, 1952.
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Didion likewise connected her openness to experience to her refusal of received ideas. In an essay titled “Why I Write,” she traced her preference for the concrete over the abstract to her student days at the University of California, Berkeley. She could never stay focused on the intricacies of Marxist dialectics, or on any other great system of thought, she recalled. Instead her attention would inevitably turn to something like “a flowering pear tree outside my window and the particular way the petals fell on my floor.” If she meditates on these images for long enough, they reveal their own unique “grammar.” She insists on taking the word “grammar” literally:
All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. … The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement.With our master narratives, we attempt to impose order on our ever-shifting perceptions of an ever-shifting world (petals falling to the floor, snow falling in the Sierras). Didion wants to write in the exact opposite way: “Nota bene. [The picture] tells you. You don’t tell it.”
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| Alberto Luís, Agustina, 1957. |
Iniciámos a confeção da marmelada na tarde de Setembro ainda quente. Entretém-me contando histórias do tempo em que era jovem, do que ouviu dos antepassados ou do que viveu, sabendo que me deixo arrebatar pelo mistério da confluência de mundos e realidades. Fala-me sobre almas penadas que erram pelo nosso universo e se escondem da luz do dia pelos campos agrestes, nas matas de zambujeiro, nelas permanecendo enredadas, até à hora mágica do anoitecer, altura em que se libertam e passeiam pelo mundo dos vivos, enquanto os pássaros regressam aos ninhos. Narra-me histórias de fátuas esferas de luz prateada que amedrontam os passantes na noite, acompanhando-os por longos percursos, girando à sua volta como libelinhas do além e desaparecendo inexplicavelmente, tal como aparecem. Recorda episódios sobre encontros à meia-noite, nas portas dos cemitérios, com seres enigmáticos, incorpóreos, que esperam os homens e mulheres tardios, regressando do trabalho ou da taberna, a horas que não são de gente de carne. Seres que nos visitam e se revelam, dialogando com os vivos, fingindo que o são e desvanecendo-se quando lhes convém. No tempo antigo conheceu fenómenos relacionados com o desrespeito da sexta-feira santa, porque nesse dia sagrado não se trabalha. Não se lava a roupa nem se passa a ferro nem se cozinha, sob pena de o trabalho ser manchado pelo sangue que Cristo derramou. Afiança-me que é assim. Que sempre será. Que tenho de respeitar.
Digo que a minha fome desse tempo nasceu no estômago, no centro de mim, mas nunca saberei ao certo de onde veio. Comprimia-o, pontapeava-o. Era uma dor que não matava, tal como a saudade de alguém que nos morre. Engolia os alimentos depressa sem os mastigar. Sentia-lhes o delicioso paladar rápido, e o torrão sólido caía no estômago começando a enchê-lo como a um saco de batatas, tubérculo a tubérculo. O monstro da fome é um grande amigo quando está saciado. Sinto-me consolada. Se não, vai-me espetando no estômago o seu ferrão, para que não me esqueça. Não esqueço. Acalma-te, fome, eis as tuas oferendas! Pão com marmelada. Pão com manteiga. Pão com chouriço. Teria preferido sentir fome nos pulmões para saciá-los com grandes golfadas de ar. Ou no coração, para correr e acelerar a pulsação. Calhou-me o monstro multicéfalo da fome no interior do estômago, ligado ao cérebro. É como se tivesse cogumelos a crescer no interior escuro e húmido do meu corpo. Esporos de fome semeados pela criação. Se tivesse sido logo o que vim cá ser, viveria em paz com o monstro e dormiria com ele, como com um cão. Medito. Remoo. Maldigo. Eu ainda não sou o que vim cá ser. E o que é isso que me espera?
(...) a esperança não é unívoca. Ela tem um claro eixo temporal, mas complementado por um eixo relacional forte. Ela é uma tensão, um desejo, um "esperar que", e ao mesmo tempo supõe uma relação de confiança com outro, à maneira de um pacto dialógico que nos faz dizer "espero em ti".
