stranger (2)

When the crops were under cover on the Wayne farm near Pittsford in Vermont, when the winter wood was cut and the first light snow lay on the ground, Joseph Wayne went to the wing-back chair by the fireplace late one afternoon and stood before his father. These two men were alike. Each had a large nose and high, hard cheeckbones; both faces seemed made of some material harder and more durable thatn flesh, a stony substance that did not easily change. Joseph's beard was black and silky, still thin enough so that the shadowy outline of his chin showed through. The old man's beard was long and white. He touched it here and there with exploring fingers, turned the ends neatly under out of harm's way. A moment passed before the old man realized his son was beside him. He raised his eyes, old and knowing and placid eyes and very blue. Joseph's eyes were as blue, but they were fierce and curious with youth. Now that he had come before hos father, Joseph hesitated to stand to his new heresy.

"There won't be enough in the land now, sir," he said humbly.

The old man gathered his shawl of shepherd's plaid about his thin straight shoulders. His voice was gentle, made for the ordering of simple justice. "What do you wish to complain of, Joseph?"

"You've heard that Benjy has gobe courting, sir? Benjy will be married when the spring comes; and in the fall there will be a child, and in the next summer another child. The land doesn't stretch, sir. There won't be enough."

The old man dropped his eyes slowly and watched his fingers where they wrestled sluggishly on his lap. "Benjamin hasn't told me yet. Benjamin has never been very dependable. Are you sure he has gone seriously courting?"

"The Ramseys have told it in Pittsford, sir. Jenny Ramsey has a new dress and she's prettier than usual. I saw her today. She wouldn't look at me."

"Ah; maybe it's so, then. Benjamin should tell me."

"And so you see, sir, there won't be enough in the land for all of us."

John Wayne lifted his eyes again. "The land suffices, Joseph," he said placidly. "Burton and Thomas brought their wives home and the land sufficed. You are the next in age. You should have a wife, Joseph."

"No sir," Joseph protested. "The farm is too small and-" He bent his tall body down toward his father. "I have a hunder for land of my own, sir. I have been reading about the West and the good cheap land there."

John Wayne sighed and stroke his beard and turned the ends under. A brooding silence settled between the two men while Joseph stood before the patriarch, awaiting his decision.

"If you could wait a year," the old man said at last, "a year or two is nothing when you're thirthy-five. If you could wait a year, not more than two surely, then I wouldn't mind. You're not the oldest, Joseph, but I've always thought of you as the one to have the blessing. Thomas and Burton are good men, good sons, but I've always intended the blessing for you, so you could take my place. I don't know why. There's something more strong in you than in your brothers, Joseph; more sure and inward."

"But they're homesteading the western land, sir. You have only to live a year on the land and build a house and plough a bit and the land is yours. No one can ever take it away."

"I know, I've heard of that; but suppose you should go now. I'll have only letters to tell me how you are, and what you're doing. In a year, not more than two, why I'll go with you. I'm an old man, Joseph. I'll go right along with you, over your head, in the air. I'll see the land you pick out and the kind of house you build. I'd be curious about that, you know. There might be even some way I could help you now and them. Suppose you lose a cow, maybe I could help you to find her; being up in the air like that I could see things far away. If only you wait a little while I can do that, Joseph."

"The land is being taken," Joseph said doggedly. "The century is three years gone. If I wait, the good land might all be taken. I've a hunger for the land, sir", and his eyes had grown feverish with the hunger.

John Wayne nodded and nodded, and pulled his shawl close about his shoulders. "I see," he mused. "It's not just a little restlessness. Maybe I can find you later." And then decisively: "Come to me, Joseph. Put your hand here - no, here. My father did it this way. A custom so old cannot be wrong. Now, leave your hand there!" He bowed his white head, "May the blessing of God and the my blessing rest on this child. May he live in the light of the Face. May he love his life." He paused for a moment. "Now, Joseph, you may go to the West. You are finished here with me."

The winter came soon, with deep snow, and the air was frozen to needles. For a month Joseph wandered about the house, reluctant to leave his youth and all the strong material memories of his youth, but the blessing had cut him off. He was a stranger in the house and he felt that his brothers would be glad when he was gone. He went away before the spring had come, and the grass was green on the hills on California when he arrived.

Início de "To a God unknown", de J. Steinbeck 1933

Net or no net, my tiny spider webbing spirit has been joyously weaving, from page to page to page. Ever since I dropped the evening-newsy frame of mind, tiny spidery heart has been beating hard. I had thought it "strange" that Camus' masterpiece should be translated as "Stranger" and not "outsider", which made a little more sense to me. Now I can see the possibility of connections and the full meaning of the word, used here in a similar way by Steinbeck, a quarter century before. In a way, the French/European idealised new Man came to happen fully only in America, that whiteboard of opportunity.

stranger

"The Stranger" was the book I enjoyed reading the most lately. I'd read it before, too many years ago, when life was through books. Having lived the sensuous outside, "The Stranger" comes with more vivid colors, its paradoxes more accute, its influence more positive (I hope). It's interesting to see how we can now be free, how it just took a few for liberation. Even more interesting is how freedom of thought is such a painful experience that most people reject, and I mean atheism. Mersault is a character I'm disgusted by for his indifference but he's also myself: I owe my beliefs to Mersault more than I owe the bible. Somehow, fifty years later, there is a possible middle way for the absurd/existencialist man: he knows he will die alone but, every now and then, he's still able to reach through. We're island people.

Note: I wonder what went through Michelangelo's mind when he had the ideia for the touching fingers. Adam's Creation is now revised. The spark of life is no longer, but the spark of awareness (E.T.). "Hey, I think I nailed it!" And, one musing follows another, the backgroung behind "God" is the correct anatomically accurate shape of a human brain but also of an uterus, the green cloth standing for the umbilical cord. There was never any god at all was there...

Her eyes were sparkling

Yesterday was Saturday, and Marie came as we’d arranged. She had a very pretty dress, with red and white stripes, and leather sandals, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. One could see the outline of her firm little breasts, and her sun-tanned face was like a velvety brown flower. We took the bus and went to a beach I know, some miles out of Algiers. It’s just a strip of sand between two rocky spurs, with a line of rushes at the back, along the tide line. At four o’clock the sun wasn’t too hot, but the water was pleasantly tepid, and small, languid ripples were creeping up the sand.

Marie taught me a new game. The idea was, while one swam, to suck in the spray off the waves and, when one’s mouth was full of foam, to lie on one’s back and spout it out against the sky. It made a sort of frothy haze that melted into the air or fell back in a warm shower on one’s cheeks. But very soon my mouth was smarting with all the salt I’d drawn in; then Marie came up and hugged me in the water, and pressed her mouth to mine. Her tongue cooled my lips, and we let the waves roll us about for a minute or two before swimming back to the beach.

When we had finished dressing, Marie looked hard at me. Her eyes were sparkling. I kissed her; after that neither of us spoke for quite a while. I pressed her to my side as we scrambled up the foreshore. Both of us were in a hurry to catch the bus, get back to my place, and tumble on to the bed. I’d left my window open, and it was pleasant to feel the cool night air flowing over our sunburned bodies.

The Stranger by Albert Camus
The whole book online here (.pdf file)

And if anybody knows why eyes brighten with happiness, please drop a line..

"Ephemeral Creation"

Digging, digging Albert Camus. Come back, read again, reread, recall. Another author that is difficult to find on the Portuguese bookstore "modern" shelf. Best-sellers and TV anchors, starlets and celebrities, gourmet-wanna-be-picture-books. Paper waste. Here I leave a short essay, this and a few more here. The Paradox of Absurd.

Ephemeral Creation
Albert Camus

At this point I perceive, therefore, that hope cannot be eluded forever and that it can beset even those who wanted to be free of it. This is the interest I find in the works discussed up to this point. I could, at least in the realm of creation, list some truly absurd works. (Melville's Moby Dick, for instance). But everything must have a beginning. The object of this quest is a certain fidelity. The Church has been so harsh with heretics only because she deemed that there is no worse enemy than a child who has gone astray. But the record of the Gnostic effronteries and the persistence of Manichean currents have contributed more to the construction of orthodox dogma than all the prayers. With due allowance, the same is true of the absurd. One recognizes one's course by discovering the paths that stray from it. At the very conclusion of the absurd reasoning, in one of the attitudes dictated by its logic, it is not a matter of indifference to find hope coming back in under one of the most touching guises. That shows the difficulty of the absurd ascetics. Above all, it shows the necessity of unfailing alertness and thus confirms the general plan of this essay.

But if it is still too early to list absurd works, at least a conclusion can be reached as to the creative attitude, one of those which can complete absurd existence. Art can never be so well served as by a negative thought. Its dark and humiliated precedings are as necessary to the understanding of a great work as black is to white. To work and create "for nothing," to sculpture in clay, to know one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries---this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and magnifying on the other, it the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.

This leads to a special conception of the work of art. Too often the work of a creator is looked upon as a series of isolated testimonies. Thus, artist and man of letters are confused. A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape. Likewise, a man's sole creation is strengthened in its successive and multiple aspects: his works. One after another they complement one another, correct or overtake one another, contradict one another, too. If something brings creation to an end, it is not the victorious and illusory cry of the blinded artist: "I have said everything," but the death of the creator which closes his experiences and the book of his genius.

That effort, that superhuman consciousness are not necessarily apparent to the reader. There is no mystery in human creation. Will performs this miracle. But at least there is no true creation without a secret. To be true, a succession of works can be but a series of approximations of the same thought. But it is possible to conceive of another type of creator proceeding by juxtaposition. Their words may seem to be devoid of inter-relations, to a certain degree, they are contradictory. But viewed all together, they resume their natural groupings. From death, for instance, they derive their definitive significance. They receive their most obvious light from the very life of their author. At the moment of death, the succession is but a collection of failures. But if those failures all have the same resonance, the creator has managed to repeat the image of his own condition, to make the air echo with the sterile secret he possesses.

The effort to dominate is considerable here. But human intelligence is up to much more. It will merely indicate clearly the voluntary aspect of creation. Elsewhere I have brought out the fact that human had no other purpose than to maintain awareness. But that could not do without discipline. Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man's sole dignity: the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes an ascesis. All that "for nothing," in order to repeat and mark time. But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

Let there be no mistake about aesthetics. It is not patient inquiry, the unceasing, sterile illustration of a thesis that I am calling for here. Quite the contrary, if I have made myself clearly understood. The thesis-novel, the work that proves, the most hateful of all, is the one that most often is inspired by a smug thought. You demonstrate the truth you feel sure of possessing. But those are ideas one launches, and ideas are the contrary of thought. Those creators are philosophers, ashamed of themselves. Those I am speaking of or whom I imagine are, on the contrary, lucid thinkers. At a certain point where thought turns back on itself, they raise up the images of their works like the obvious symbols of a limited, mortal, and rebellious thought.
They perhaps prove something. But those proofs are the ones that the novelists provide for themselves rather than for the world in general. The essential is that the novelists should triumph in the concrete and that this constitute their nobility. This wholly carnal triumph has been prepared for them by a thought in which abstract powers have been humiliated. When they are completely so, at the same time the flesh makes the creation shine forth in all its absurd luster. After all, ironic philosophies produce passionate works.

Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity! And diversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mind is that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of its impending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of the work and of life. Detached from it, the work will once more give a barely muffled voice to a soul forever freed from hope. Or it will give voice to nothing if the creator, tired of his activity, intends to turn away. That is equivalent.
Thus, I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought---revolt, freedom, and diversity. Later on it will manifest its utter futility. In that daily effort in which intelligence mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror's attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one's fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.

Let me repeat. None of all this has any real meaning. On the way to that liberty, there is still a progress to be made. The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror, is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings: succeed the granting that the very work, whether it be conquest, love, or creation, may well not be; consummate thus the utter futility of any individual life. Indeed, that gives them more freedom in the realization of their work, just as becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorized them to plunge into it with every excess.
All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal. Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renunciatory, flowers in images. It frolics---in myths, to be sure, but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering and, like it, inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral passion.

From chapter 10 of The Myth of Sisyphus: "Absurd Creation: Ephemeral Creation". 1942.

o equilíbrio do dia

Revisão, revisões. D'O Estrangeiro, Camus. Edição dos Livros do Brasil, data não encontro mas eu comprei-o em 90 porque queria uma cópia, a minha mãe sempre a reclamar que eu lhe tirava os livros e nunca mais devolvia. Queria tomar notas e sublinhar e pôr pontos de exclamação e marcá-los com guardanapos de papel de café. No liceu enchia as páginas de notas minúsculas a lápis, por todo o lado, na Faculdade a mesma coisa, a páginas tantas e tantas. Por acaso neste não escrevi nada. Nos anos oitenta o escrevinhar era mais compulsivo. Precisamente nove meses depois de comprar este livro, nasceu a minha filha. Não que me lembre, a única coisa que escrevi no livro, a caneta, foi o mês e o ano em que o comprei. Esta edição d'O Estrangeiro foi traduzida por Rogério Fernandes, informação que aparece minúscula, na página lateral. O árabe aparece umas vezes com minúscula, outras com maiúscula. Bem que a Cotovia lhe podia pegar. Por outro lado, têm um certo encanto estas edições baratíssimas de grandes livros.

___

Distinguia, de longe, a pequena massa sombria do rochedo, rodeado de uma auréola formada pela luz e pela poeira do mar. Pensava na nascente fresca que havia por trás do rochedo. Desejava reencontrar o murmúrio da água que dela brotava, desejava fugir ao esforço, às lágrimas de mulher, desejava, enfim, reencontrar a sombra e o repouso. Mas quando cheguei mais perto, vi que o árabe de Raimundo voltara ali.

Estava só. Descansava de costas, as mãos debaixo da nuca, a cabeça nas sombras do rochedo e o resto do corpo ao sol. O seu trajo fumegava de calor. Fiquei um pouco admirado. Para mim, era história antiga, e viera para aqui sem pensar no caso. Logo que me viu, levantou-se e meteu a mão na algibeira. Eu, muito naturalmente, agarrei no revólver de Raimundo, dentro do casaco. Então, o árabe deixou-se cair outra vez para trás, mas sem tirar a mão da algibeira. Eu estava bastante longe dele, a uns dez metros de distância. Adivinhava-lhe por instantes o olhar, entre as pálpebras semicerradas. Mas a maioria das vezes a imagem dele dançava diante dos meus olhos, na atmosfera inflamada. O barulho das vagas era ainda mais preguiçoso do que ao meio-dia. Eram o mesmo sol e a mesma luz, que se prolongavam até este momento. Havia já duas horas que o dia deitara a sua âncora neste oceano de metal fervente. No horizonte, passou um pequeno vapor. Adivinhei-lhe a mancha negra com o canto do olho, pois não cessava de fitar o árabe.

Pensei que me bastava voltar para trás e tudo ficaria resolvido. Mas atrás de mim, comprimia-se uma imensa praia vibrante de sol. Dei alguns passos para a nascente. O árabe não se moveu. Apesar disso, estava ainda bastante longe. parecia sorrir, talvez por causa das sombras que se lhe projectavam na cara. Esperei. A ardência do sol do dia em que a minha mãe fora a enterrar e, como então, doía-me a testa, sobretudo a testa e todas as suas veias batiam ao mesmo tempo debaixo da pele. Por causa desta queimadura que já não podia suportar mais, fiz um movimento para a frente. Sabia que era estúpido, que não me iria desembaraçar do sol simplesmente por dar um passo em frente. Mas dei um passo, um só passo em frente. E desta vez, sem se levantar, o árabe tirou a navalha da algibeira e mostrou-ma ao sol. A luz reflectiu-se no aço e era como uma longa lâmina faiscante que me atingisse a testa. No mesmo momento, o suor amontoado nas sobrancelhas correu-me de súbito pelas pálpebras abaixo e cobriu-as com um véu morno e espesso. Os meus olhos ficaram cegos, por detrás desta cortina de lágrimas e de sal. Sentia apenas as pancadas do sol na testa e, indistintamente, a espada de fogo brotou da navalha, sempre diante de mim. Esta espada a arder corroía-me as pestanas e penetrava-me nos olhos doridos. Foi então que tudo vacilou. O mar enviou-me um sopro espesso e fervente. Pareceu-me que o céu se abria em toda a sua extensão, deixando tombar uma chuva de fogo. Todo o meu ser se retesou e crispei a mão que segurava o revólver. O gatilho cedeu, toquei na superfície lisa da coronha e foi aí, com um barulho ao mesmo tempo seco e ensurdecedor, que tudo principiou. Sacudi o suor e o sol. Compreendi que destruíra o equilíbrio do dia, o silêncio excepcional de uma praia onde havia sido feliz. Voltei então a disparar mais quatro vezes contra um corpo inerte, onde as balas se enterravam sem se dar por isso. E era como se batesse quatro leves pancadas, à porta da desgraça.

De O Estrangeiro, Camus