Monday, April 23, 2007

 

Pronto....

Estou pronto para não aprontar
Parar de tatear e titubear
Não estou pronto para o velho
Paro... por ali... fui muito além
Do que devia pro-pagar
(P)aragem obrigatória para solfejar
Paira no ar o empurrão que vou levar
O tombo
Vai ralar
Aos escombros não dou de ombros
Fico somente a fitar
O novo não é velho, o novo existirá
Novelo de novilhas, velhice já tardia...

Monday, April 16, 2007

 

On... Going... Api Files March-ing...





Away from Home


Reasons for travel from The Wilson Quarterly:

Travel began as a precise landlord’s retribution, and no matter how plush the circumstances of movement have become, lodged still in travel’s DNA are the traces of a sweet deal gone sour: The big plane will shudder, the ­high-­decked ship rock the Segway reverse course. And physical shocks are the least of it. Our errant first parents had only each other to endure. But we move in the company of . . . others, and it costs us. The assorted penalties of contemporary travel are evidence of how long the Almighty can hold a ­grudge.
Adam and Eve had no choice but to be on their way. We elect to go, over and over. The figures from the Travel Industry Association of America are staggering. “Travel and tourism” is said to be a $1.3 trillion industry in the United States. “Total domestic person trips,” defined as trips that take you 50 miles or more from home, or force you to spend at least a night away from home, totaled 1.2 million in 2004 (the number has no doubt gone up since), and more than 80 percent of them were not for business or professional purposes but for leisure travel. We can’t wait to lock the front door and unsheathe the handle on that tippy piece of wheeled ­luggage.
Why do we go? Our motives are pretty much what the motives for elective travel have always been: to see the country, or the world; to know the unknown; to open ourselves to new experience; to relax; to confirm that, by golly, people the world over really are the same. An intrepid few of us may even insist, with Robert Louis Stevenson (Travels With a Donkey), “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake.” Easy enough for him to say; the jackass he traveled with wasn’t the garrulous stranger in an adjacent ­seat.
But what’s left for the casual traveler to discover? Since that day when the world was all before our unsettled ancestors, a lot has happened. Adam and Eve may have traveled light, but they did carry curiosity from Eden, and it was the best part of their legacy. All the brave individuals, down through the ages, who said to themselves, “I know what’s here, but what’s elsewhere?” and then set out to answer the question, made us a gift of the world they ­observed.
The great heroic age of travel and exploration is ended. The planet’s become a familiar sight to billions of ­people—­not because they’ve been everywhere, or anywhere necessarily, but because so many others have done the job for them and broadcast the results, in words and images. It’s not just the world’s signature architectural ­sites—­the easy stuf like Pyramids, Parthenon, Pantheon, Kremlin, and ­such—or natural wonders, like the Nile in flow, that we recognize. Thanks to natuer TV, we’re savvy about the world’s rarest flora, and practically on speaking terms with a lot of its fauna. Haven’t we all felt the pain of those hapless penguins, whose ­to-­and-­froing acro Antarctica for the species’ survival seems hardly preferable to their fallback fate as a sea lion’s lunch? The camera can profile an insect borne from egg to oblivion on an indifferent carrion bird, or find the shyest mollusk mating in an undersea recess. It won’t be long before TV runs out of novel world, unless evolution picks up the ­pace.

Monday, April 02, 2007

 

Pío Baroja

Pío Baroja

El árbol de la ciencia (fragmento)

" Uno tiene la angustia, la desesperación de no saber qué hacer con la vida, de no tener un plan, de encontrarse perdido. Andrés se inclinaba a creer que el pesimismo de Schopenhauer era una verdad casi matemática. El mundo le parecía una mezcla de manicomio y de hospital; ser inteligente constituía una desgracia, y sólo la felicidad podía venir de la inconsciencia y de la locura. "

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