Abstracto

Figure created with a Mondrian generator program

He told them they didn’t have to worry about what the arrangement actually looked like: “interpret it,” he told them, “this is a creative art”. Unfortunately, saying that sometimes led to his having to tell someone, “You know, maybe you shouldn’t make the vase six times larger than the teacup.” “But you told me I should interpret it” was invariably the reply, to which, as kindly as he could, he in turn replied, “I didn’t want that much interpretation.” The art-class misery he least wished to deal with was their painting from imagination; yet because they were very enthusiastic about “creativity” and the idea of letting yourself go, those remained the common themes from one session to the next. Sometimes the worst occurred and a student said, “I don’t want to do flowers or fruit, I want to do abstraction like you do.” Since he knew there was no way to discuss what a beginner is doing when he does what he calls an abstraction, he told the student, “Fine - why don’t you just do whatever you like,” and when he walked around dutifully giving tips, he would find, as expected, that after looking at an attempt at an abstract painting, he had nothing to say except “Keep working”.

Philip Roth, Everyman

Vida Vivida

Everyman. Um livro escrito da morte e para a morte, e por isso repleto de vida, de uma vida vivida. A inconfundível escrita de Roth em que cada palavra, cada frase tem um peso e densidade muito particular e uma grandiosa beleza. O ser (verbo e não nome) humano em toda a sua plenitude, seu pathos, seu fado: a infância, o sexo, a morte. O facto de ser uma narrativa escrita, apesar de introspectiva e intimista, na terceira pessoa é, neste caso, interessante porque sempre um pouco perturbante. Nada em Roth é light, cada unidade semântica é uma porta que se abre, um ponto de partida, um mote.

Nothing could extinguish the vitality of that boy whose slender little torpedo of an unscathed body once rode the big Atlantic waves from a hundred yards out in the wild ocean all the way in to shore. Oh, the abandon of it, and the smell of the salt water and the scorching sun! Daylight, he thought, penetrating everywhere, day after summer day of that daylight blazing off a living sea, an optical treasure so vast and valuable that he could have been peering through the jeweler’s loupe engraved with his father’s initials at the perfect, priceless planet itself - at his home, the billion-, the trillion-, the quadrillion-carat planet Earth! He went under feeling far from felled, anything but doomed, eager yet again to be fulfilled, but nonetheless, he never woke up. Cardiac arrest. He was no more, freed from being, entering into nowhere without even knowing it. Just as he’d feared from the start.
Philip Roth, Everyman

"There's no remaking reality," she told him. "Just take it as it comes. Hold your ground and take it as it comes."

Philip Roth, Everyman