We tend to consider ourselves half-witted when we read a comment which exceeds our capacity or reason. It’s very easy to say “I’m just dumb and that’s that”. It shouldn’t feel funny, it’s just the way it is. We have a natural facility for everything that reaches our knowledge or taste, and a capacity to reject anything our mind denies or even refuses to consider.
So we are not as open-minded as we thought. Choosing what we want and leaving what we don’t is our nature. I think I’ve never seen anyone that reads everything and remembers it all, not even Borges, and even he was tough to get. And choosing is nature also because, well, because we are what we are (this doesn’t justify all of our shortcomings, it just states human abilities).
We choose what we read then. I myself tend to be more attracted to a Jules Verne book (any of them) than a book about all the geographic details Verne chooses to mention. I’m not impartial.
But.. despite all of this, literary criticism is something that seems everlasting. We know we are somehow half-witted. We just ignore it. “We’re the kings of the world”- we say now. We don’t know nothing but assuming that there isn’t much more than what meets our eyes everyday. It brings some comfort to the deeper fears of the human being itself. And we’re just halfway in the road to the truth. We have our cup filled half full now. We saw ourselves as dumb. But it didn’t stay for long. And now, we see ourselves as great. There seems to be no real balance between them. There is no real balance between us being humble (too shy for the taste) or being simply ego-centered. Where will we find ourselves then, in a few years? Our conscience is too heavy to bear. The truth itself is. And as long as we ignore it, we destroy ourselves too. Grim future lies ahead, may I say.
Published
on Friday, August 27th, 2004 at 6:17 pm
