Letícia

“For our species, the idea of art as ornament is a relatively new one. Our ape brains got too big, too big for our heads, too big for our mothers to birth them. So we started keeping all our extra knowing in language, in art, in stories and books and songs. Art was a way of storing our brains in each other’s. It wasn’t until fairly recently in human history, when rich landowners wanted something pretty to look at in winter, that the idea of art-as-mere-ornament came around. A painting of a blooming rose to hang on the mantel when the flowers outside the window had gone to ice. And still in the twenty-first century, it’s hard for folks to move past that. This idea that beauty is the horizon toward which all great art must march. I’ve never been interested in that. “As heaven spins, I fall into bedlam.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“Often when I imagine you,
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer,
and I am dark;
I am forest.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God

“Por isso falava silenciosamente com o sol, na língua das estrelas, dizendo-lhe que viesse mais devagar, por favor, mais devagar. E, naquele mesmo momento, Iaakov Markovitch, deitado em sua cama, que pela primeira vez era também a cama de Bela Markovitch, implorava: mais devagar, por favor, mais devagar. E o sol, apesar de cientistas que insistiam que não era mais que fusão de hidrogênio e hélio, não podia negar as súplicas. Pois o sol – independentemente do que dissessem os cientistas – amava as pessoas em sua totalidade, na medida em que a distância permitia. Não fosse assim não circularia em torno delas dia e noite com preocupação, com dedicação maternal. E mesmo se cientistas dissessem que não era o sol que girava em torno das pessoas, e sim as pessoas em torno dele, e, mais grave ainda, que o giro nada tinha a ver com amor ou preocupação, e fosse motivado apenas por leis físicas, não haveria como contestar nem por um segundo aquilo que o olho enxergava e o coração sabia.”
― Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, One Night, Markovitch

“I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.
You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.
Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer