Para reflectir...

Cameron Gray

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” 

Alice Walker

Ouvem os livros a falar uns com os outros? / Books speak among themselves

“Until then I had thought each book spoke of the things, human or divine, that lie outside books. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the library seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, centuries-old murmuring, an imperceptible dialogue between one parchment and another, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by a human mind, a treasure of secrets emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.” 

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

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As leitoras de Thomas Sully

Thomas Sully, 1834

Thomas Sully, 1842

Thomas Sully, s.d.

"Amorzade" e a escrita enquanto analgésico

Termo usado por António Lobo Antunes na sua mais recente crónica para a revista Visão. Aqui deixo dois excertos:

"O pintor italiano Valerio Adami dedicou-me assim um desenho. Com amorzade e a justeza da expressão surpreendeu-me: não me tinha passado pela cabeça que é exactamente o que sinto pelos meus amigos, os vivos e aqueles que morreram, ou antes, não morreram, só não puderam vir hoje, logo à noite ou amanhã telefonam e estarão no sítio em que combinámos, sem falta, e a gente a abraçar-se às palmadas nas costas. Porque razão os homens se abraçam sempre às palmadas nas costas? Sobretudo se estivemos uns tempos sem nos vermos é um festival de pancadaria cúmplice, acompanhado de palavras ternas tais como

- Meu cabrão

e outras doçuras no género.

(...)

Isto, de criar, palavra de honra que é muito difícil, mas é a única forma de as dores secretas abrandarem. E então fingimos que não há nada e continua-se. O que custa um livro, o que deve custar um desenho, um simples traço até. Porém é um tormento que equilibra e igualmente, em certas alturas, um júbilo indizível. Felizmente que ando com um livro, numa altura em que a minha relação comigo me tem feito sofrer..."

Podem ler na íntegra AQUI.

A arte, a falsificação, o prazer e a dor / Art, forgery, pleasure and pain

Porque é que a falsificação de um quadro extremamente fiel ao original não nos dá o mesmo prazer? Seremos snobes em relação à arte? Porquê a diferença de sensibilidades? A resposta pode ser fascinante. A do psicólogo Paul Bloom, intitulada  "The Origins of Pleasure" (As origens do prazer) certamente o é.

"Why do we like an original painting better than a forgery? Psychologist Paul Bloom argues that human beings are essentialists -- that our beliefs about the history of an object change how we experience it, not simply as an illusion, but as a deep feature of what pleasure (and pain) is". TED

Veja o vídeo AQUI.

Um conselho de escritor para escritor / From one writer to another

Ernest Hemingway

“One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing it for a year, you go away and you have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice. But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when you are doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go. But if you stop when you are going good, as Hemingway said… then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!”

Roald Dahl

A verdadeira razão porque eu leio / The true reason why I read

"I read because I hate how reality limits me".

Eu leio porque odeio os limites que a realidade me impõe.

Nesta linha, concordo com Mario Vargas Llosa:

“But thanks to literature, to the consciousness it shapes, the desires and longings it inspires, and our disenchantment with reality when we return from the journey to a beautiful fantasy, civilization is now less cruel than when storytellers began to humanize life with their fables. We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.”

Mario Vargas Llosa, In Praise of Reading and Fiction

Procura e sê o melhor naquilo que gostas / "Pursue the things you love doing..."

"You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don't make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing and then do them so well that people can't take their eyes off of you".

Maya Angelou

8 leitoras na praia / Eight women reading at the beach

Marie Fox

David Laity

Gérard Dubois

Marie Fox

Fred Calleri

Albert-Jan Cool

Giselle Porter

Elu Auvinen no Deviant Art

Os livros por José Jorge Letria

D. Quixote por Juan Carlos Pedreira Fernández

Apetece chamar-lhes irmãos,
tê-los ao colo,
afagá-los com as mãos,
abri-los de par em par,
ver o Pinóquio a rir
e o D. Quixote a sonhar,
e a Alice do outro lado
do espelho a inventar
um mundo de assombros
que dá gosto visitar.


Apetece chamar-lhes irmãos
e deixar brilhar os olhos
nas páginas das suas mãos.

José Jorge Letria

As leitoras de Sara Afonso

Sara Afonso (1899-1983), pintora e ilustradora portuguesa.

Já sei por onde vou!

O que escrevo é para mim!

I  cannot write to anyone outside myself—if I tried, it would be a horrible story, flat and lifeless. I write to myself. That’s the only person I’m trying to please.

Shannon Hale

Ainda a beleza das redes sociais: twittando! / The gentle art of twittering