In my wildest dreams I am an omnipotent god. I do the most unbelievable things without even trying. I go anywhere I want, I create, I destroy, I eat, I drink, I fuck without the least objection to my will. However, somewhere inside my brain I know those are dreams, the workings of a feverish imagination. I know I will have to wake up and also to deal with how much my mind can conceive and how little my frail body can actually accomplish.
I presume it’s safe to say we are all dictators in our dreams? “Everybody wants to rule the world”, etc. Apparently we would all reshape this planet if we could, so that it might fit our idea of a decent habitat, and, not surprisingly, the most popular religions offer man the possibility of finding eternal bliss in an afterlife which in practice will bring exactly that: a life in our own terms.
Come to think of it, both things (unchecked freedom in this world, endless bliss in the next one) amount to the same. We want power. We want to do what we want without thinking abou the consequences. Without thinking, period. We want to freely exercise our will and see all of our desires fully realized. Pronto. And we would be deceiving ourselves by thinking pious, humble religious people who “give up everything” in this world to obtain salvation in heaven are a natural and solid objection to this view. For they want the same thing you and I want, they just learn how to be patient, how to cope with how things are in this cruel world, so thar they may obtain their “treasures in heaven”. They merely postpone what you, you ambitious vermin, claims to want right now: unbridled power.
There’s no blame to be laid here, I am not criticizing my neighbor’s hypocrisy, at least not this time, for both he and I are- natural beings. A product of nature. No matter if he believes a deity made this world especially for him. He is a natural creature too, what, in relation to us, is basically the same as saying: he is an animal. And what does an animal want? To survive. To survive as long as he can. You’re not different, in this respect, from your dog. And what’s the difference in relation to the human animal, does he have any natural advantage over other animals in this never ending fight for survival, for the next day? Of course he has. I will not talk here about all the abilities of the human brain and how it’s a much more impressive machine than the brains of even the most intelligent animal species. This is not the place for this. I will only say our brain should not be seen as anything more than what it most surely is: a tool for survival.
Both the guy who dreams of being a despot in this world and the one who prefers to dream of being a sultan in the next one, use their brains to live and to cope, both of them are richly endowed with one of the truly amazing talents of our brains: imagination. See, a despot dreams of being THE cruellest, the meanest, the most tyrannical despot ever. He never fulfills this desire. His cruellest moments are all confined within the limits of his imagination. Ditto for the child of heaven. He actually believes he will experience the utmost freedom, the utmost joy, the utmost realization when “that great day” comes. He seldom can actually express what his blissful neo-existence will consist of. He has a feverish imagination, he has to have one if he must fathom this poor grain of sand we proudly call “our planet” was especially made by a divine hand, and made for him, but this imagination does not go far enough to bring us a convincing picture of heaven.
But whether Christian, whether atheist, whether rich or poor, whether North American or Brazilian, it is a fact that a human being, a man, has to learn the means to "get by" here on this earth. It doesn't matter if he thinks that life here is worth little or worth a lot, whether this one is for him just a passage or our complete existence, all the life we will ever know. In any case, he has to adapt, survive and gain means, gather strength, to face everyday life and the struggle of all against all that constitutes human existence.
In this context, each one will have more or less limited access to the fruits of education, which is nothing more than another tool for survival, the most complete of all, certainly, but just a tool, which we must learn to use correctly, or we end up being easily manipulated by those who learned to use it better than us.
First of all, I need to stop looking at education with idyllic eyes and be a little cynical about it. There is nothing romantic about being educated. On the contrary, it is often a painful process. The picture of a guy innocently pursuing knowledge, as something that will take him "beyond" himself, placing him on a plane distant from everyone else, appeals, of course, to our aesthetic taste, but it is flawed. Our understanding is necessarily limited. Our capacity for perception often becomes confused. Many a time, we want to deceive ourselves about things. So, if we go after an idealized knowledge, we will be looking for a ghost, because if knowledge has no use in the construction of our being, what use does it have? Knowledge is something to be used, because if it isn't, it won't be worth anything, it will just be a collection of data congesting our brain. Wikipedia and the internet already perform this function.
Furthermore, I must consider what kind of education I need at the stage of life in which I find myself, and whether my education is sufficient to perform the functions I propose to perform at the moment, serving, moreover, for my entertainment, and for the solidification of my intellect, that is, [I need to know] if the knowledge I have is really rooted in my brain, as part of me, or if it escapes me all the time, like a kind of food that my organism cannot digest.
I take Horace's "Nil admirari" (not to be surprised by anything) as a starting point in everything in life. I don't get surprised either by things or by people. This I achieve based on the assumption that I am on the same level as all of them, and as I know what they all want deep down, at the bottom: the same as me. I cannot, therefore, assume a position of enchantment or wonder in reference to knowledge. I love books, I'm a bookworm, but I had to learn to tame my love for the written word, so as not to let myself be "carried away" by the enthusiasm for each new idea, each new worldview, each new understanding that I see presented in an opus. Acting like this, I manage to read anything that may somehow interest me, by reading things with more curiosity than admiration, although I truly respect the intellectual work of someone who sometimes took years, decades, to write a book.
But I cannot be surprised by the result of the work itself, although I recognize, more than anyone else, the hardness of intellectual work. I need this stoic posture if I want, as I do, to have contact with as much culture as my brain can assimilate without "evaporating" in the process and without losing sight of my need for evasion, escape, even romanticism- the side irrational sense of existence- not becoming, thus, too serious in my own view, laughing at life as one needs to do sometimes.
Nor can I be surprised when someone is more knowledgeable than I am, in a given field.
Mankind has known times when there was an ideal of a human being who knew all things, was interested in all subjects, ie, was literate in the broadest sense of that term. What we might call a Renaissance man. To this day, there has never been a more complete model of this type of man than Leonardo da Vinci. However, recognizing da Vinci's genius or not, we have to admit that the body of knowledge available at his time was much more restricted than today. Leonardo was indeed a genius and was indeed interested in everything, but even with the precarious level of knowledge in some areas at his time, he was never able to develop his knowledge in a specific field definitively, becoming an authentic and indisputable master of that field. On the contrary. To this day, he figures as the perfect model of a curious man, interested in everything, willing to know everything, and this admirable image we have of him will never change as time goes by. But we have to study the man in the context of his times. The ideal of man that Leonardo (and many others) represented has something romantic about it, because not even the most arrogant guy would be able to presume, today, that he can efficiently store in his brain all the knowledge available to man. And storing it in his brain effectively would mean: using, in practice, all of his knowledge.
That is not possible, not even conceivable.
The degree of knowledge that one acquires today of his own field of work is, in general, limited, what you notice talking to anyone, be he a lawyer, a doctor, a writer or a judge. Acquiring a wide range of knowledge in the most varied fields, then, is unimaginable.
So I accomodate myself to the notion that my knowledge will necessarily be limited, and this right off the bat, and so I don't get carried away with the level of knowledge in some field that another guy might have. What I need is not go around pretending to have deep knowledge in certain fields where I know I am ignorant. Thus, I cannot want to discuss quantum physics, nor high cuisine. Both these fields are not beyond me, they just don't interest me, if I really wanted to know them I could, but this at the cost of knowing other things that are much more useful to me.
This concept of the usefulness of knowledge is essential. Yes, indeed, we have to be utilitarian where education is concerned.
Everything useful for understanding (and enjoying) life is useful to be learned. Everything that only throws life into a conceptual confusion, everything that serves to cast doubt on the very reality of life must be seen either as mere curiosity or as something really harmful (counterproductive). I don't want my mind to be a storehouse of useless knowledge. So I appropriate knowledge by extracting from it, from books, movies, music, etc, everything that is useful to me, leaving aside everything else, without a second thought.
The classic image of the intellectual is that of a boring man. A guy with a lot of theoretical knowledge about the world, but very little social skill, very little ability with practical life, with flesh and blood people. And, of course, the image of a guy who managed, somehow, to save in his head an endless amount of data (information), names, historical events, personalities, etc, sometimes knowing by heart whole books, but perpetually in a bad mood, for not enjoying life for a single moment, not being able to put any idea into practice, for existing, in short, only theoretically. Like a ghost from the world of ideas thrown, against his will, among the living.
What I want is neither the boastful pride of the Renaissance man nor the traditional posture of the intellectual guy closed in on himself, capable of enumerating all the philosophical systems of the world, but without any real ability to face life as it is.
So I redefined education for myself. I need to know what literature has for me, what music has for me, what gastronomy, science, medicine serve for. Nothing exists in vain, nothing should be used or learned for nothing. With each book, I try to find out not only the context in which it was written, what its author intended to say, whatever the story, whatever the ideas defended by the author, but also what the work has to offer me. If the author fails to convince me, after the first 50 pages, that he has something to say to me, I give up the book, no matter if the author is Kant, Emerson or Saramago. I do the same with other arts: Renoir makes a very strong aesthetic impression on me. Picasso does nothing for me.
So I reassess the whole edifice of human knowledge without pretending that I can go up even to the first floor, because what matters to me is that whatever I manage to learn in life, it must have some real use, and can be either put into practice, or used for my improvement, either in the intellectual or in the physical sense of this word.
In this process, I never allow someone to call me ignorant without first knowing if the field of knowledge in which the person claims to perceive my ignorance is really in my interest, and if I really affirmed to master it or something of the kind. I am the judge of my own ignorance, as of my degree of knowledge. I realize my own shortcomings, and I will never try to argue about things I know I don't understand, because my selfish pride prevents me from doing so.
This is a way I found to give a proper, personal meaning to the very notion of education, in order to be constantly educating myself, because in truth only the individual can educate himself. Others sometimes point us in the right direction, point us to sources of knowledge, help us memorize names and dates, but without our own initiative (and will) to learn anything, all that a master has to give us are empty formulas.
But for the master, our knowledge means nothing. If we manage to convince him that we memorized the formulas he taught us, he is satisfied. It is not for him that we have to learn something, in fact if there is something that time has effectively taught me, it is that to be really educated is to no longer need any master, teacher or guru in life.
To be educated is to be an autonomous being, as autonomous as a human being can be in this world, that is.
Addendum- BOOKS OF MY LIFE
Whatever we think about education, books are part of it, and I decided to compile here those books that had such an impact on my life that I could never get them out of my mind, even after reading books by the hundreds.
They are special books that, say, if I went to a desert island without access to anything else, and had to choose just a few books to read there, these would be the chosen ones, and I put the books in order of relevance (if I had to choose 23, I would take them all, if I had to choose five, only the last five, if I had to choose only one, it would have to be The Unique and Its Own).
Here is a brief summary of why each opus is essential to me.
Nausea (La Nausée, Jean-Paul Sartre, 1938)
Sartre was far from being an exciting novelist. His style was boring and very verbose. But Nausea was the first book I remember reading in my life, before I was 18, and it made a strong impression on me, especially the protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, and the feeling of "inadequacy" with the world that he felt, a sensation I myself already perceived at the time, though I couldn't verbalize it properly.
Candide (Candide ou l'Optmisme, Voltaire, 1759)
No need to praise Candide too much, everyone who has read this book recognizes that it is one of the most hilarious things ever written. The impact he made on me in my late teens was notorious, Voltaire fascinated me as much for his relentless sarcasm as for his literary talent. The author taught me, two hundred and fifty years later, to laugh a little at life, at a time when I was depressed and constantly thinking about suicide.
The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Arthur Schopenhauer, 1819)
This was the first philosophical book I read (in its entirety) in my life. It was not an easy task, I had only read summaries of the lives and ideas of the great philosophers before. Schopenhauer ended up being an important influence in my life when I was about 22, with his aesthetic sensitivity and his desperate, desolate view of the world. Everyone who reads Schopenhauer is immediately impressed not only with his impeccable style, his absolute mastery of the language he uses, but also with his emotionality: an European man, in the midst of a time of profound revolutions in Europe, openly proclaiming the lack of meaning in life... The romantic sensitivity of ours easily identifies with Schopenhauer. I ended up realizing, little by little, that the guy's world view was very limited and limiting. Nowadays, I still think with nostalgia of the enthusiasm that his ideas caused in me at first reading, but I recognize that the inconsistencies of Schopenhauer's system stand out. To begin with, he was a pessimist who didn't believe in his own pessimism. He invalidated his own system with his own life.
Italian Journey (Italienische Reise, Goethe, 1816)
I read this book well past the age of 34, but it stuck in my memory as a perfect, finished example of a travel book. Goethe was the quintessence of the Renaissance and Enlightenment man, a really educated guy, interested in knowing and understanding everything he could in the world, but he was devoid of the typical arrogance of the Renaissance man. He was humble in a sense that his genius dispensed with, he was curious about everything, and he entered the home of a man with far less intellectual baggage than he had with that innocence of a child who has a lot to learn. His travel report through a country (Italy) fascinating, but strange to him, instigates you so much that you accompany him every step of the way with the same interest that the country causes in him. He was a genius, but faced the same difficulties as anyone when dealing and having to adapt to a culture different from his. Those who find it so difficult to deal with the strange, the different, should read this book and learn a little from Goethe. Vain hope, but that doesn't detract from the poignant beauty of this book.
Enchiridion ((Ἐγχειρίδιον, Epictetus, year unknown)
What to say about a life manual written by a slave that does justice to Epictetus's ideas and clarity of mind? It's hard to even believe that Epictetus existed actually. Because a being as stoic as he is seems like something out of fiction. And yet, he really represents the quintessence of the stoic man, that man who learns to master himself to such an extent that nothing affects him, nothing surprises him, facing life with such dignity that even if you don't want to, you end up admiring. The book is essential for me precisely because it represents this ideal of man. I don't follow ideals, I won't pretend to be stoic. But I try to assimilate some of Epictetus' recommendations into my life without worrying about following some "system" that, if contradicted, makes me feel at odds with myself. What I do, in my understanding, is to extract from Epictetus' wisdom what he himself would like me to extract from it.
Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932)
This one caught my attention, around the age of 23, as the first science fiction book I read that really had something interesting to say, with a complete and finished conception of a future world that no one would want to know, but was perhaps possible. The word soma never left my mind, and I came to use it as a synonym for any drug, any means that we use to sink into convenient oblivion.
The Fratricides (Nikos Kazantzakis, 1964)
Everything in this book is painful. Every page, every paragraph, every syllable is suffused with pain. Kazantzakis was a tragic author, but in the real sense of that term - he saw the dark, dramatic side of life and portrayed it in such an impactful way in his text that the reader feels plunged into a desolate, abandoned world, riddled with all hope, a genuine abyss where there is no place for any hope of salvation. It was the first book I read that I remember leaving me feeling physically ill. Kazantzakis' expression is powerful and he was influenced by Nietzsche's intense style, which makes his text as well-written as it is poignant.
A Short History of Decay (Précis de Décomposition, Émile Cioran, 1949)
Reading this book at the age of 23 makes a tremendous impact. I had already read Schopenhauer's work, I was already familiar with a pessimistic world view, but I was not prepared for Cioran. This book had such an impact on me that I reread it enough times to memorize several passages definitively. Cioran, Nietzsche's offspring, but with his own worldview, writes in a crystalline style, easy to understand, but no less powerful than the German author. His pessimistic, nihilistic view of the world and men, does not change the fact that he has an implacable lucidity to see reality, being a profound connoisseur of everything he analyzes in his text. That pessimistic view of things no longer appealed to me, but that didn't stop me from respecting Cioran and considering this book one of the essential readings of my life.
The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, Sigmund Freud, 1900)
Freud is of such vital importance in the history of human thought that citing one of his books here would seem vital to me, not just because I admire him so much, but because The Interpretation of Dreams really impresses me to this day every time I read any passage in the book. The book is a dive into an area of the human experience that had, up to that point, been little explored and, for that very reason, is full of surprises and discoveries, and the way in which Freud threw himself into research, trying at all costs to understand the human psyche and the foundations of our mental affections, cannot fail to inspire respect. We may have outgrown the Freudian worldview as something outdated, but I'll never let go of the strong impression this book made on me.
Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-dämmerung, Friedrich Nietzsche, 1889)
From Nietzsche I could also quote the beautiful The Gay Science, but definitely, what impressed me most in his respectable catalog was Götzen-dämmerung. The "hammer philosophy" here is so different from the egocentric and neurotic tone of "Ecce Homo" (aesthetically beautiful, too) and "Antichrist" that, if it weren't for the characteristic style, we'd say it was a different author. But it is the same Nietzsche, and this book perfectly portrays his work of deconstructing idols (iconoclasm), in order to teach the reader never to idolize or even admire someone again without first fully understanding who that person was and what their motivations were. It was the most perfect literary expression of "Nil admirari".
Memoirs from the House of the Dead (Записки из Мёртвого дома, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, 1860)
Of Dostoyevsky I could cite his entire body of work as being essential. He doesn't have bad books in his catalogue, they're all very good, at worst. But in choosing a single book of his that is essential in my life, I will not choose any of his literary masterpieces, but an account of real life, poignant to an extreme degree. What stands out about the book is not the fact that it is a personal experience of one of the great Russian writers. It is the fact that Dostoyevsky offers a painfully real, but not overly pessimistic, picture of the prison system at the time, emphasizing that some of the best people he knew in his life were incarcerated with him, and the book serves, above all, as a portrait of one of the most admirable characteristics of the Russian people, their ability to stand anything, to survive anything, to adapt to anything, without losing sight of what they are.
My Universities (Мои университеты, Maxim Gorky, 1923)
Another Russian work, by another great writer, and which caught my attention for a similar reason to Dostoyevsky's work. Gorky stands out for his succinct, direct, honest style, and for being a guy who lived one of the most fundamental moments in the history of the Russian people (the 1917 revolution) intensely, providing panels of Russian life, whether in the pre- or in the post-revolutionary era that are as moving as they are compelling. His perambulation among the simplest layers of the population, where he found all kinds of people, a true tableau of the Russian population of his time, spawned some books, like this one, which are certainly among the best things I have ever read in my life.
The Castle (Das Schloss, Franz Kafka, 1926)
This book by Kafka is torture to read. But 'torture' in a good way, in the best way. The book is an impressive tour de force, a masterpiece that at first glance seems incomplete but actually needn't have a proper ending, because that takes nothing away from its intensity. The "castle" of the title can represent so much, the scope of the story is such, that, like Dom Quixote (that I will mention later), this work serves almost as a perfect allegory of the human condition, and this, of course, within the suffocating, "nightmarish" Kafka's style, which does not let the reader breathe for even a single page. My experience reading this book in German wasn't necessarily the easiest or most pleasant, but Kafka doesn't let you stop reading, he hooks you from the first to the last page, always urging you to continue reading to find out where the poor "hero" will be next time, even if you can deduce, from the first page, that he will never enter the "castle". Absolutely great.
Sentimental Education (L'Éducation Sentimentale, Gustave Flaubert, 1869)
Reading this book after a heartbreak is very revealing. The master of style Flaubert delivers a story of heartbreak such as I have never seen before or since. Above all, a story of overcoming love, of understanding this feeling, of coming of age. As important as educating ourselves about science, the world, is educating ourselves about our feelings, for sometimes they put us in extremely unpleasant situations. Following Fréderic Moreau's story and not identifying with it at various times is impossible. Flaubert's impeccable style elevates the book to the level of a masterpiece.
The Betrothed (I Promessi Sposi, Alessandro Manzoni, 1827)
Here is another book that I remember reading at a very young age, around the age of 17, but I had to reread it later, forcibly, and in the original Italian language. That's because this book represents the most perfect literary affirmation of romanticism that I know of. We know that this movement is known for its exaggerations and frills, for its artificiality. But it is a fact that the era of romanticism also generated, whether in literature or in the other arts, in general, monuments of incomparable beauty. The Betrothed is one of those monuments. The beauty of this book is almost indescribable. From the first to the last page, there is such a care with the form, with the delicacy of the expression, with the exactness of the feelings, that I can only believe Manzoni was extremely inspired in the times in which he wrote it. There is nothing out of place here, everything is beautiful, everything is sumptuous, and even when the author talks about the plague, the misery that torments his characters, he does so in such a poetic and impeccable way that the book generates imperishable images in our minds.
The Betrothed is an indisputable masterpiece of world literature, and from the first reading the book impressed me as being a perfect, finished model of a love story, a love story that doesn't tire, that doesn't bore or exhaust the reader, rather, makes him feel envious of the characters, for not being able to be there with them, experiencing those feelings, sharing their pain, wandering through those places that are now lost in time and history, but which, thanks to the masterful pen of the Italian author, were etched in history forever. Manzoni never wrote anything comparable to "I Promessi Sposi". He knew that he could never top that work.
It's basically a Renoir painting in the shape of a book.
War and Peace (Война и мир, Leo Tolstoy, 1869)
The universal masterpieces enter my life in a not very logical sequence. Around the age of 32, I decided that I would read all the essential works of world literature. And where did I start? With War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy's monumental book, so admired, so talked about, so copied, deserves its place among the ten essential works of my life, and also in the history of literature. I realized the grandeur of this work through my own eyes. It's not just about Tolstoy's style, the myriad of characters, the historical context. It is also about Tolstoy's firm position on the war, on the Russian people and on Napoleon Bonaparte. The middle section of the book contains an authentic treatise about the French emperor, who also wanted to conquer Russia for himself, but ended up finding there a worthy enemy, and his final defeat. Tolstoy is utterly ruthless in his portrayal of Napoleon, depicting him as a spoiled and arrogant dictator, a reflection of an equally artificial people who idolized him. And he praises the strength of the Russian people, the strength of the Russian land, which put the guy on the run. "War and Peace" has all the qualities you want to see in it, it is an epic, it is literature of the highest quality and, above all, it is a testament to an era and a perfect portrait of a time in Russian history which, much thanks to Tolstoy, can never be forgotten.
The Outsider (Colin Wilson, 1956)
I got to Colin Wilson's Outsider by chance, I must have been around 28 years old if I'm not mistaken, I saw a copy of the book in a library and I was interested in the title. I had just read a romanticized biography of the life of Vincent Van Gogh which interested me immensely. The Dutch painter is exactly one of the outsiders brilliantly portrayed by Wilson in this book, and the guy really managed to bring together a selection of unique men in history that always arouse our fascination for completely challenging our standards, whether social, artistic or philosophical, creating, with their own existences, a unique and inimitable pattern. I read this book long before Stirner's "Unique", but it serves as a complement to this one, because it presents many examples of the kind of unique beings Stirner talked about in his work. To this day, it's one of the books I never get tired of reading.
Germinal (Germinal, Émile Zola, 1885)
What I said about "The Betrothed", that it perfectly represents Romanticism, must also be applied to Zola's Germinal as far as Naturalism is concerned. I remember being about 30 years old when I read this book. I felt inclined to read it in the original French, even though I imagined it wouldn't be easy. It wasn't. Zola, "son and heir" of Balzac, strictly followed his father's model: he was extremely fond of details, to the point of even boring the reader even with so many minutiae. But just like the "father", he was a genius, and among his works, the most perfectly finished and brilliant is undoubtedly this one. Zola overcame Balzac in his describing French society as it was in his time. In his eagerness to be as realistic, as "natural" as possible, the author reproduced in the book the exact language of the simplest layers of the population, personally going to the kind of miners described in the book so as to learn, in loco, the language and the habits of those people. This did not happen before his time. Balzac and Hugo were fond of detail, of course, but reaching Zola's level of realism wasn't for everyone.
The book's characters are all "people", people of flesh and blood, who speak, think, sleep, etc, like real people. It's an absolutely stunning feat. You even get disgusted by the attitudes and talk of the characters, but that's because you know that that's life, just as it is, without adornments, without disguise. And Etienne Lantier? Like Mersault (see "The Stranger" below) and Antoine Roquentin (see "Nausea" above), Lantier became one of the literary characters of my life. Amidst all the dirt, all the poverty, all the misery that "Germinal" presents, who does Zola choose to be the hero of the book? A real socialist, a guy who really believes in socialism, who is really decent and who really wants to help others. Lantier's moral firmness emerges as a contrast to the sad environment that surrounds him and is a genius move by Zola. This book is a real punch in the stomach for anyone who tries to see human reality as something idyllic or romantic.
Fathers and Sons (Отцы и дети, Ivan Turgeniev, 1862)
I spoke about Dostoyevsky, Gorky and Tolstoy. In the pantheon of Russian authors I have to also include Turgeniev, a sort of Slavic Manzoni. The same subtlety in Manzoni's description and treatment of characters exists in Turgeniev, a guy who manages to deal with the heaviest themes in the world in the most subtle and elegant way possible, making almost no effort to please the reader, who follows him in his narrative wherever it takes him. The characters in this book are etched in my memory forever, especially the "nihilist" Bazarov, a portrait of a type of man who, at the time, posed a challenge to all Russian social institutions. Bazarov is a literary hero on the same scale as Mersault and Jean Valjean, and the scene of his death, so poignant, will never leave my head. No one on earth has ever written about generational conflict, about rebels and conformists and the reasons behind both, with Turgeniev's level of delicacy.
Dom Quixote (Dom Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, 1615)
All I could say about Don Quixote is nothing compared to the immensity of text that has already been made to talk about this book. And what did I find reading it? That it's all true. Don Quixote is an incomparable masterpiece. Absolutely perfect. There is nothing to take away or add to the book. The comic and tragic side of the iconic character attracts us in such a way, and he ends up representing our very essence as human beings so perfectly, that it is not absurd to say that the book is the most complete literary representation ever made of humanity. Our whole history is there, everything we do in life, at any time, in any place, is fighting against "windmills", against ghosts existing only in our heads. Accompanying the misadventures of Don Quixote and his unfortunate squire Sancho Panza is like closely following the trajectory of human beings on this planet in all their misery but also in all the glory of their struggle against circumstances that want to finish them, but never succeed. The book must be read in the original, in Spanish. Cervantes' rich vocabulary is impressive, and no matter how much time passes, the book loses none of its charm.
The Death of Ivan Ilytch (Смерть Ивана Ильича, Leo Tolstoy, 1886)
There's a reason Tolstoy is the only writer with two books mentioned here. He is my favorite writer. I consider him as THE model writer, the one with the most impeccable, most perfect style. Everything he wrote is interesting, and it's all extremely well written. How could it be otherwise with Ivan Ilyich? This little tale, such a simple story at first look, is actually a great allegory about how human beings deal with death. By the way, how they have to deal, sooner or later. The protagonist, an absolutely mediocre man, ends up having to deal with the "inevitable". And then he ponders his whole life, and then he realizes the falsehood of others, who just want to get rid of him as soon as possible when he gets sick. Ilytch's "shock" with death is impressive, due to Tolstoy's extremely rich, impeccable writing, but also because death is a problem with which all of us will have to deal, and then, perhaps, we will have to accept that our whole life was a farce, that everything that we did was done poorly, that nobody really loved us, they just pretended to tolerate us because they needed us, just as the character had to realize. Or maybe we won't notice any of it. Maybe we will just die in our sleep, and never reflect on anything. Anyway, the opus made a strong impression on me towards the end of my adolescence. I reread it several times and always with the same satisfaction. Literature in state of perfection.
The Stranger (L'Étranger, Albert Camus, 1942)
What I said about Dostoyevsky applies to Camus as well. Absolutely everything the guy wrote is, at least, worth reading. He has no bad book. Speaking about Colin Wilson's "Outsider" above, I said that the American author excelled in portraying the lives of unique, fascinating individuals like Van Gogh. Here is a kind of reverse side of the coin: Mersault. Just like that, only a name. Like the "K." by Kafka. The character is an authentic representative of a kind of personality, which I call homo liber (free man), a guy without ties, without philosophies in life, without attachment to conventions or labels, concerned only with living, with merely existing. I identified with him the first time I read the book. For all intents and purposes, Meursault was me. That guy lost in the world, who cannot understand why he has to pretend feelings, why he has to stick to social conventions that he did not create, and who does not understand why one cannot live, exist, in a natural way, a guy who lives in the moment, does not have big plans, or high morals, or a desire to change the world, and is undisturbed by others who think he MUST care.
Mersault exists naturally, as a product of a world, of a reality, which allows him to exist, so the moral judgments of humanity are of no value to him. So much so that after committing a crime "by chance" and being convicted, after a trial that causes him more astonishment than anger, he ends up reconciling himself with his future, realizing that the more he cared, the more his behaviour would go against his philosophy of life- ie, not having a philosophy of life, at all. Camus was spot on in portraying in this book a kind of human being that became the norm in his time and later, and that needed to have a literary expression, and this could not be more perfect than the one given by the French writer.
The Unique and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, Max Stirner, 1844)
Everything I write these days doesn't make much sense without taking into account the impact this book has had on my life. I first read it when I was 32. I was no longer a young man. I had already completely given up on the idea of being "influenced", in any way, by any work. But reading Stirner messed up with my head in such a way that I was never the same afterwards. So much so that I read it for the first time in English, but then I had to check the original German text, and I ended up deciding to create a version in Portuguese as well.
This book challenges so many concepts, brings such a broad horizon to our understanding of ourselves and the world that I still become shocked, each time I open it, for discovering a new facet that had previously escaped me. This is not an act of worship for Stirner. It is necessary to understand this. Because the subject of the book is one which, if understood by the reader, will necessarily lead to a state of non-worship, non-idolatry for anyone. The subject of the book is me. The individual. The subject is our uniqueness. Our singularity. The fact that each of us exists, at a given time and in a given place, as an event which will never be repeated. And the fact that we have no reason to be ashamed of it. All at once, Stirner challenges centuries and centuries of concepts, preconceptions, notions, beliefs and ideas about man, in such a way that you end up, after reading the book, with fundamentally nothing in your hands- but, at the same time, with all that really matters.
Because the Unique makes you take a stand, makes you face your intimate reality and no longer be ashamed of it. Then, a whole time in your life that you spent pretending to follow some ideal, some religion, those ideas that you only followed for convenience, for imitation, loses its meaning for you, and in fact you become a "new man", but only because you are free, free in the fullest sense that a man can be on earth. The book is indeed liberating. Not because it promises an idealized or hypothetical freedom that you only chase but never reach. But for revealing the freedom that it is possible, for a person of flesh and blood, to achieve in this world.
Then the idea that, in praising this work, I am idolizing Stirner, naturally falls to the ground. Because what he teaches me is not to take HIM as a standard, as a model to follow, as many other thinkers do, but to take MYSELF as a model, as a reference, as a starting point in everything and everything. He doesn't tell me to dive into a senseless egotism, but to realize that, within the possibilities of an individual in this world, we have a vast field of action where we can act, be ourselves, and this without being ashamed for a single minute for never being able to be what others expect or hope from us. Finally, to be your only judge, to be the "Owner" of your own life, and of everything that interests you in the world, putting things, such as feelings, emotions, reason itself, at my service, at the service of my ego, living each moment 100% aware of what I am and of what I do.
Reading Stirner is highly liberating, and without running the slightest risk of being charged with idolatry, I don't hesitate for a minute in calling this the book of my life.
By Maxx (Homo liber).
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