Li este artigo sobre o poder redentor e humanizante dos gatos; é verdadeiramente incrível como os gatos olham para além do passado e focam-se na pessoa que no momento presente têm à sua frente:
I had not touched a cat in 15 years when an orange kitten wandered over to sit with me in the grass one day. I was left without adequate words to describe that experience. It reminded me that I am alive. It instilled in me a raw, unbridled happiness that I had never felt before, not even as a child.
Lauren Groff - Matrix
“Before the girl begins to wail and Marie crosses the room to plunge the burnt hand into the washing water, Marie thinks that true we are not animals; but it would be foolish to think we’re better than animals. Animals are closer to god, of course; this is because animals have no need of god.”
It occurred to me, deep into a really wonderful experience, of reading and thinking and feeling and pondering, that if Wizards of the Coast had published exactly the same material online — and you can imagine this easily: you can imagine the website, as slick as one of the Google Arts & Culture sites, or the digital book from the Steve Jobs Archive — I would have clicked over; said, “wow, cool”; then moved on to the next thing.
Digital reading just cannot support engagement of this kind — call it “spending time with the material”—at least not for me. I know I am not alone.
Isto é algo com o qual me tenho estado a debater, como tantas outras inquietações da minha vida. O ano passado senti que comprar livros era a única forma de os ler. A certo ponto cansei-me de os comprar e de esperar para os ler e virei-me para o mundo digital do Kobo. E agora olho para a minha estante de livros, parados, objectos estáticos em tempos adquiridos ou oferecidos, e pergunto-me se vale mesmo a pena mantê-los.
Do episódio “A.l. School Is in Session: Two lakes on the Future of Education” podcast Hard Fork:
From my perspective, the biggest change that we need to implement urgently — and that we are implementing, but it’s not happening as fast as it needs to — is a shift in literacy. It will pain me to say this, and it may pain some of your readers to hear this, but longform, immersive literacy is coming to an end as a widespread cultural phenomenon. People do not read now like they did 10 years ago. They don’t read like they did two years ago. They definitely don’t read like they did 30 years ago.
Now, this gets complicated — who people, where. How much literacy was there ever? Bracket all that. Even in the most elite circles, the ability to give yourself to an immersive textual experience is ending. This has enormous implications for a tradition that has meaningfully inscribed itself textually. And part of what you came to university in the humanities to do was to read books. But you can’t anymore because nobody can read them.
Foi precisamente acerca deste tópico que eu fui entrevistado pelo Público há uns tempos atrás. Na altura a questão cingiu-se apenas à população masculina, mas acredito piamente que este panorama se verifica ao longo de todo o espectro de géneros e idades.
Kaveh Akbar - Martyr!
“Eight of the ten commandments are about what thou shalt not. But you can live a whole life not doing any of that stuff and still avoid doing any good. That’s the whole crisis. The rot at the root of everything. The belief that goodness is built on a constructed absence, not-doing. That belief corrupts everything, has everyone with any power sitting on their hands.”
Kazuo Ishiguro - Nunca me Deixes | Tradução de Rui Pires Cabral
“O momento de compreender que lá fora, no mundo, existem pessoas como a Madame, pessoas que, embora não nos odeiem nem nos desejem mal, estremecem de pavor perante a ideia da nossa existência - da nossa origem e do nosso destino - e que reme a simples possibilidade de lhes tocarmos. A primeira vez que nos vemos reflectidos desse modo nos olhos de alguém é um momento de frialdade. É como olhar para um espelho que utilizamos desde sempre e descobrir de súbito algo de diferente, algo de estranho e perturbador.”
Estou completamente de acordo com a opinião de Sally Rooney.
But as Sinéad Ní Shiacáis said after her arrest last weekend: “We are not the story; the Palestinian people are the story. They are begging people to give them a voice.” Palestine Action has been among the strongest of those voices in the UK, taking direct steps to halt the seemingly unstoppable machinery of violence. We owe their courageous activists our gratitude and solidarity. And by now, almost two years into a live-streamed genocide, we owe the people of Palestine more than mere words.
Tenho estado desaparecido do Instagram. Sinto que precisava de uma pausa das redes sociais. Desinstalei as aplicações do telemóvel. E desapeguei-me de todas as que ainda consultava diariamente, libertando-me da subjugação do “algoritmo”. Julgava ser essa a solução. E, pese embora tenha sido uma experiência positiva, de certa forma também senti uma falta de interagir com uma comunidade tão dedicada à leitura como aquela do Instagram, da qual espero continuar a fazer parte.
A decisão de adoptar a Cecília não foi fácil nem repentina. Não foi um impulso, longe disso, mas o resultado de um longo processo de ponderação, conversas e condições práticas. Embora o amor tenha florescido e crescido, tratou-se de um amor planeado. A exigência de garantir que havia estabilidade financeira e emocional para receber a Cecília no nosso lar foi imprescindível. A consciência da responsabilidade foi o nosso primeiro acto de amor. E, assim, a decisão de adoptar a Cecília foi uma das melhores da nossa vida.
Robert Jordan & Brandon Sanderson - A Memory of Light
“The wind rose high and free, to soar in an open sky with no clouds. It passed over a broken landscape scattered with corpses not yet buried. A landscape covered, at the same time, with celebrations. It tickled the branches of trees that had finally begun to put forth buds. The wind blew southward, through knotted forests, over shimmering plains and toward lands unexplored. This wind, it was not the ending. There are no endings, and never will be endings, to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was an ending.”
