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Dois Olhares

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen."

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

 

Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut

Eddie Key, personagem de "Breakfast of Champions", foi o escolhido pela sua geração para memorizar toda a história da sua família. Ele, como receptáculo deste conhecimento, sentia que era um veículo, um veículo para o futuro da sua herança geneológica, e que os seus olhos eram um pára-brisas através do qual os seus antepassados, caso quisessem, podiam observar o mundo.

 

Numa época de individualismo e de, ao mesmo tempo, uniformização e globalização de costumes e regras, de aplicação de modelos descontextualizados do tempo e local, sob o pretexto de uma alegada sofisticação superior (veja-se como o Hallloween tem ganho importância entre nós), as raízes culturais e a história comum dissipa-se. O indíviduo atomiza-se, torna-se numa ilha, não existe sentimento de pertença. E, sem esse sentimento há indiferença perante a res publica, o bem comum. 

 

Torna-se imprescindível, não um regresso às origens, mas um relembrar das raízes, da cultura de cada povo, gritar como o homem do leme perante o Mostrengo:

"Aqui ao leme sou mais do que eu:
Sou um Povo que quer o mar que é teu;"

And here, according to Trout, was the reason human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad:

 

“Ideas on Earth were badges on friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.

 

“The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.

 

“They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, begars would ride.’

 

“And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.

 

“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And when they built computers to do some thinking for them, they designed them so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”

 

Kurt Vonnegut, "Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye, Blue Monday"

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