The Hitler Family

Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D minor

Solo Monk - Thelonious Monk

Bertrand Russell fala sobre religião (1959)

I am a body.

"Must take absolute care not to be self–pitying or self–centered.

Always prided myself on my reasoning faculty and my stoic materialism. I don’t have a body, I am a body. Yet consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true, or as if an exception would be made in my case. Feeling husky and tired on tour? See the doctor when it’s over!"

(Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Loc. 778-9)

“Dulce et Decorum Est.”

"When I was first thinking of a possible title for this book, I considered annexing the line “Obscene as cancer,” from Wilfred Owen’s terrifying poem about death on the Western Front, “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The action describes the reaction of a group of exhausted British stragglers, caught in the open during a gas attack for which they are ill–prepared:

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of
fumbling, 
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; 
But someone still was yelling out and 
stumbling, 
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime 
. . .
 Dim, through the misty panes and thick
 green light, 
As under a green sea, I saw him
 drowning. 

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, 
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, 
drowning. 
If in some smothering dreams you too 
could pace 
Behind the wagon that we flung him in, 
And watch the white eyes writhing in his 
face, 
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of 
sin; 
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood 
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted 
lungs, 
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud 
Of vile incurable sores on innocent 
tongues,— 
My friend, you would not tell with such 
high zest 
To children ardent for some desperate 
glory, 
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est 
Pro patria mori."

 (Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Loc. 757-69)

a large black metal crucifix embedded tenaciously in the wall.

 

RIZI, Francisco, Auto-da-fe on Plaza Mayor, Madrid,1683

"I have been cycled through various great American hospitals in the course of my experience, at least one of which is famous for being operated by a historic religious order. In each of the rooms of this hospital, from no matter what perspective you lie in bed, the commanding view is decidedly that of a large black metal crucifix embedded tenaciously in the wall. I had no special objection to this on one level, because it really did little more than repeat the name of the hospital itself. (I tend not to pick my fights with the chaplains’ departments until I have a proper point to make. In Texas, for instance, in a purpose–built brand–new facility that took the towers to the level of more than two dozen, I got them to agree in principle that it was slightly idiotic not to boast of a thirteenth floor but instead to skip from twelve to fourteen. Surely nobody checks in here to complain of cosmic fears generated by a number, or would check out because of it: We seem incidentally quite unable to discern how this dank little superstition ever got started.) However, I also happen to know that it was a practice, during the wars of religion and the campaigns of the Inquisition, to subject the condemned to a compulsory view of the cross until they had died. In some of the fervent paintings of the grand autos-da-fe, or “acts of faith,” not I think excluding some of the burnings alive captured by Goya on the Plaza Mayor, we see the flame and the smoke arising from the vicinity of the victim, and then the cross itself held grimly aloft before his closing eyes. I have to say that, even if this is now done only in a more “palliative” fashion, it makes me feel disapproving on the grounds of its earlier sadomasochistic associations. There are banal, quotidian hospital and medical practices that remind people of state–sponsored torture. In my own case, there are also practices that I can’t separate from the hell of earlier ones."

(Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Loc. 743-56 )

(no Museu judaico de Praga)

It is our common fate.

"Eventually, and in miserable circumstances in the Italian city of Turin, Nietzsche was overwhelmed at the sight of a horse being cruelly beaten in the street. Rushing to throw his arms around the animal’s neck, he suffered some terrible seizure and seems for the rest of his pain–racked and haunted life to have been under the care of his mother and sister. The date of the Turin trauma is potentially interesting. It occurred in 1889, and we know that in 1887 Nietzsche had been powerfully influenced by his discovery of the works of Dostoyevsky. There appears to be an almost eerie correspondence between the episode in the street and the awful graphic dream experienced by Raskolnikov on the night before he commits the decisive murders in Crime and Punishment. The nightmare, which is quite impossible to forget once you have read it, involves the terribly prolonged beating to death of a horse. Its owner scourges it across the eyes, smashes its spine with a pole, calls on bystanders to help with the flogging . . . we are spared nothing. If the gruesome coincidence was enough to bring about Nietzsche’s final unhingment, then he must have been tremendously weakened, or made appallingly vulnerable, by his other, unrelated sufferings. These, then, by no means served to make him stronger. The most he could have meant, I now think, is that he made the most of his few intervals from pain and madness to set down his collections of penetrating aphorism and paradox. This may have given him the euphoric impression that he was triumphing, and making use of the Will to Power. Twilight of the Idols was actually published almost simultaneously with the horror in Turin, so the coincidence was pushed as far as it could reasonably go."

( Loc. 596-608)

I am typing this just had an injection to try to reduce the pain in my arms, hands, and fingers. The chief side effect of this pain is numbness in the extremities, filling me with the not irrational fear that I shall lose the ability to write. Without that ability, I feel sure in advance, my “will to live” would be hugely attenuated. I often grandly say that writing is not just my living and my livelihood but my very life, and it’s true. Almost like the threatened loss of my voice, which is currently being alleviated by some temporary injections into my vocal folds, I feel my personality and identity dissolving as I contemplate dead hands and the loss of the transmission belts that connect me to writing and thinking. 

These are progressive weaknesses that in a more “normal” life might have taken decades to catch up with me. But, as with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer toward death. How could it be otherwise? Just as I was beginning to reflect along these lines, I came across an article on the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. We now know, from dearly bought experience, much more about this malady than we used to. Apparently, one of the symptoms by which it is made known is that a tough veteran will say, seeking to make light of his experience, that “what didn’t kill me made me stronger.” This is one of the manifestations that “denial” takes. I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche, stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker. So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.

(Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Loc. 666-81)

the freedom of speech

"My chief consolation in this year of living dyingly has been the presence of friends. I can’t eat or drink for pleasure anymore, so when they offer to come it’s only for the blessed chance to talk. Some of these comrades can easily fill a hall with paying customers avid to hear them: They are talkers with whom it’s a privilege just to keep up. Now at least I can do the listening for free. Can they come and see me? Yes, but only in a way. So now every day I go to a waiting room, and watch the awful news from Japan on cable TV (often closed–captioned, just to torture myself ) and wait impatiently for a high dose of protons to be fired into my body at two–thirds the speed of light. What do I hope for? If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech."

(Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Loc. 543-49)

“All I have is a voice,” wrote W. H. Auden

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn’t precisely one of the things that engages you, often at first without your noticing it. A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull or obvious remark would be almost physically hurtful. This is how philosophy evolved in the symposium, before philosophy was written down. And poetry began with the voice as its only player and the ear as its only recorder. Indeed, I don’t know of any really good writer who was deaf, either. How could one ever come, even with the clever signage of the good Abbé de l’Épée, to appreciate the minuscule twinges and ecstasies of nuance that the well–tuned voice imparts? Henry James and Joseph Conrad actually dictated their later novels—which must count as one of the greatest vocal achievements of all time, even though they might have benefited from hearing some passages read back to them—and Saul Bellow dictated much of Humboldt’s Gift. Without our corresponding feeling for the idiolect, the stamp on the way an individual actually talks, and therefore writes, we would be deprived of a whole continent of human sympathy, and of its minor–key pleasures such as mimicry and parody. 

More solemnly: “All I have is a voice,” wrote W. H. Auden in “September 1, 1939,” his agonized attempt to comprehend, and oppose, the triumph of radical evil. “Who can reach the deaf?” he asked despairingly. “Who can speak for the dumb?” At about the same time, the German-Jewish future Nobelist Nelly Sachs found that the apparition of Hitler had caused her to become literally speechless: robbed of her very voice by the stark negation of all values. Our own everyday idiom preserves the idea, however mildly: When a devoted public servant dies, the obituaries will often say that he was “a voice” for the unheard.

(Loc. 509-24) 

For me, to remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off: the ones that made the sacrifice of the following day a trivial one. That was the way that Callimachus chose to remember his beloved Heraclitus (as adapted into English by William Cory): 

They told me, Heraclitus; they told me

 you were dead. 

They brought me bitter news to hear, 

and bitter tears to shed.

I wept when I remembered how often you 

and I Had tired the sun with talking, and 

sent him down the sky. 

Indeed, he rests his claim for his friend’s immortality on the sweetness of his tones: 

Still are thy pleasant voices, thy 

nightingales, awake; 

For Death, he taketh all away, but them

 he cannot take. 

Perhaps a little too much uplift in that closing line . . .

(Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Loc. 529-37)

“How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?”

"When you fall ill, people send you CDs. Very often, in my experience, these are by Leonard Cohen. So I have recently learned a song, entitled “If It Be Your Will.” It’s a tiny bit saccharine, but it’s beautifully rendered and it opens like this: 

If it be your will, 

That I speak no more, 

And my voice be still, 

As it was before . . . 

I find it’s best not to listen to this late at night. Leonard Cohen is unimaginable without, and indissoluble from, his voice. (I now doubt that I could be bothered, or bear, to hear that song done by anybody else.) In some ways, I tell myself, I could hobble along by communicating only in writing. But this is really only because of my age. If I had been robbed of my voice earlier, I doubt that I could ever have achieved much on the page. I owe a vast debt to Simon Hoggart of the Guardian (son of the author of The Uses of Literacy), who about thirty-five years ago informed me that an article of mine was well argued but dull, and advised me briskly to write “more like the way you talk.” At the time, I was near speechless at the charge of being boring and never thanked him properly, but in time I appreciated that my fear of self-indulgence and the personal pronoun was its own form of indulgence.

To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class, would you say, can talk? I mean really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect. I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.

(Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Loc. 493-508)

I “was” my voice

"My father’s robust health began to fail him in his late seventies and he died in late 1987. My brother, Peter, in the meantime, had become engaged to a Jewish girl and had taken her to meet “Dodo”—old Mrs. Dorothy Hickman—our only surviving grandparent. Later, and after she’d congratulated him on his choice, she rather disconcerted Peter by saying: “She’s Jewish, isn’t she?” He had agreed that this was the case and then she’d disconcerted him even further by saying, “Well, I’ve got something to tell you. So are you.”

Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir

" The absorbing fact about being mortally sick is that you spend a good deal of time preparing yourself to die with some modicum of stoicism (and provision for loved ones), while being simultaneously and highly interested in the business of survival. This is a distinctly bizarre way of “living”—lawyers in the morning and doctors in the afternoon—and means that one has to exist even more than usual in a double frame of mind. The same is true, it seems, of those who pray for me. And most of these are just as “religious” as the chap who wants me to be tortured in the here and now—which I will be even if I eventually recover—and then tortured forever into the bargain if I don’t recover or, presumably and ultimately, even if I do.

(Loc. 227-32)

There is an even longer shot that I do propose to attempt, even though its likely efficacy lies at the outer limits of probability. I am going to try to have my entire DNA “sequenced,” along with the genome of my tumor. Francis Collins was typically sober in his evaluation of the usefulness of this. If the two sequencings could be performed, he wrote to me, “it could be clearly determined what mutations were present in the cancer that is causing it to grow. The potential for discovering mutations in the cancer cells that could lead to a new therapeutic idea is uncertain—this is at the very frontier of cancer research right now.” Partly for that reason, as he advised me, the cost of having it done is also very steep at the moment. But to judge by my correspondence, practically everybody in this country has either had cancer or has a friend or relative who has been a victim of it. So perhaps I will be able to contribute a little bit to enlarging the knowledge that will help future generations.

I say “perhaps” partly because Francis has now had to lay aside a lot of his pioneering work, in order to defend his profession from a legal blockade of its most promising avenue of endeavor. Even as he and I were having those partly thrilling and partly lowering conversations, last August a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ordered a halt to all government expenditure on embryonic stem–cell research. Judge Royce Lamberth was responding to a suit from supporters of the so–called Dickey–Wicker Amendment, named for the Republican duo who in 1995 managed to forbid federal spending on any research that employs a human embryo. As a believing Christian, Francis is squeamish about the creation for research purposes of these nonsentient cell clumps (as, if you care, am I), but he was hoping for good work to result from the use of already existing embryos, originally created for in vitro fertilization. These embryos are going nowhere as it is. But now religious maniacs strive to forbid even their use, which would help what the same maniacs regard as the unformed embryo’s fellow humans! The politicized sponsors of this pseudoscientific nonsense should be ashamed to live, let alone die. If you want to take part in the “war” against cancer, and other terrible maladies, too, then join the battle against their lethal stupidity.

(Loc. 379-96 )

LIKE SO MANY OF LIFE ’S VARIETIES OF EXPERIENCE, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down. On a much too regular basis, the disease serves me up with a teasing special of the day, or a flavor of the month. It might be random sores and ulcers, on the tongue or in the mouth. Or why not a touch of peripheral neuropathy, involving numb and chilly feet? Daily existence becomes a babyish thing, measured out not in Prufrock’s coffee spoons but in tiny doses of nourishment, accompanied by heartening noises from onlookers, or solemn discussions of the operations of the digestive system, conducted with motherly strangers. On the less good days, I feel like that wooden–legged piglet belonging to a sadistically sentimental family that could bear to eat him only a chunk at a time. Except that cancer isn’t so . . . considerate.

Most despond–inducing and alarming of all, so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet–like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat. And at times it threatened, and now threatens daily, to disappear altogether. I had just returned from giving a couple of speeches in California, where with the help of morphine and adrenaline I could still successfully “project” my utterances, when I made an attempt to hail a taxi outside my home— and nothing happened. I stood, frozen, like a silly cat that had abruptly lost its meow. I used to be able to stop a New York cab at thirty paces. I could also, without the help of a microphone, reach the back row and gallery of a crowded debating hall. And it may be nothing to boast about, but people tell me that if their radio or television was on, even in the next room, they could always pick out my tones and know that I was “on” too.

Like health itself, the loss of such a thing can’t be imagined until it occurs. In common with everybody else, I have played versions of the youthful “Which would you rather?” game, in which most usually it’s debated whether blindness or deafness would be the most oppressive. But I don’t ever recall speculating much about being struck dumb. (In the American vernacular, to say “I’d really hate to be dumb” might in any case draw another snicker.) Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me. I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so. And timing is everything: the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. Now if I want to enter a conversation, I have to attract attention in some other way, and live with the awful fact that people are then listening “sympathetically.” At least they don’t have to pay attention for long: I can’t keep it up and anyway can’t stand to."

(Christopher Hitchens, Mortality, Loc. 466-93)

The holocaust is so immense that it can't be grasp in its entirely

Auschwitz, Os Nazis e a Solução Final

Jordi Savall - Improvisacion sobre 'Axerico' (Diaspora Sefardi)

he didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits

"You teach philosophy? said the voice. You teach Wittgenstein? said the voice. And have you asked yourself whether your hand is a hand? said the voice. I’ve asked myself, said Amalfitano. But now you have more important things to ask yourself, am I right? said the voice. No, said Amalfitano. For example, why not go to a nursery and buy seeds and plants and maybe even a little tree to plant in the middle of your backyard? said the voice. Yes, said Amalfitano. I’ve thought about my possible and conceivable yard and the plants and tools I need to buy. And you’ve also thought about your daughter, said the voice, and about the murders committed daily in this city, and about Baudelaire’s faggoty (I’m sorry) clouds, but you haven’t thought seriously about whether your hand is really a hand. That isn’t true, said Amalfitano, I have thought about it, I have. If you had thought about it, said the voice, you’d be dancing to the tune of a different piper. And Amalfitano was silent and he felt that the silence was a kind of eugenics. 

(Loc. 3605-12)

First he thought about madness. About the possibility—great—that he was losing his mind. It came as a surprise to him to realize that the thought (and the possibility) in no way diminished his excitement. Or his happiness. My excitement and my I happiness are growing under the wing of a storm, he said to himself. I may be going crazy, but I feel good, he said to himself. He contemplated the possibility—great—that if he really was going crazy it would gets worse, and then his excitement would turn into pain and helplessness and, especially, a source of pain and helplessness for his daughter.

(Loc. 3645-50)

Of course, he said to himself, he didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits, although during his childhood in the south of Chile people talked about the mechona who waited for riders on a tree branch, dropping onto horses’ haunches, clinging to the back of the cowboy or smuggler without letting go, like a lover whose embrace maddened the horse as well as the rider, both of them dying of fright or ending up at the bottom of a ravine, or the colocolo, or the chonchones, or the candelillas, or so many other little creatures, lost souls, incubi and succubi, lesser demons that roamed between the Cordillera de la Costa and the Andes, but in which he didn’t believe, not exactly because of his training in philosophy (Schopenhauer, after all, believed in ghosts, and it was surely a ghost that appeared to Nietzsche and drove him mad) but because of his materialist leanings."

(Loc. 3655-61)

Le Readymade malheureux de Marcel

Daqui

Por sugestão de Roberto Bolaño, 2666, onde se pode ler:

"All that exists, or remains, of Duchamp’s stay in Buenos Aires is a ready-made. Though of course his whole life was a readymade, which was his way of appeasing fate and at the same time sending out signals of distress. As Calvin Tomkins writes: As a wedding present for his sister Suzanne and his close friend Jean Crotti, who were married in Paris on April 14, 1919, Duchamp instructed the couple by letter to hang a geometry book by strings on the balcony of their apartment so that the wind could “go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages.” Clearly, then, Duchamp wasn’t just playing chess in Buenos Aires. Tompkins continues: This Unhappy Readymade, as he called it, might strike some newlyweds as an oddly cheerless wedding gift, but Suzanne and Jean carried out Duchamp’s instructions in good spirit; they took a photograph of the open hook dangling in midair (the only existing record of the work, which did not survive its exposure to the elements), and Suzanne later painted a picture of it called Le Readymade malheureux de Marcel. As Duchamp later told Cabanne, “It amused me to bring the idea of happy and unhappy into readymades, and then the rain, the wind, the pages flying, it was an amusing idea.” I take it back: all Duchamp did while he was in Buenos Aires was play chess. Yvonne, who was with him, got sick of all his play-science and left for France. According to Tompkins: Duchamp told one interviewer in later years that he had liked disparaging “the seriousness of a book full of principles,” and suggested to another that, in its exposure to the weather, “the treatise seriously got the facts of life.” 

(Loc. 3304-16 )

 

Daqui.

Vladimir Nabokov on Literature and Life: A Rare 1969 BBC Interview

Daqui. Uma oferta da Daniela.

Vincent Van Gogh, Still life with bible (1885)

(Para o Miguel)
 

Por sugestão de Darrin McMahon, The Pursuit of Hapiness, onde se pode ler: " o antes pregador leigo Van Gogh justapõe aqui a escritura antiga e a moderna: a Bíblia e o romance de Émile Zola, La Joie de Vivre a alegria ou a felicidade de viver." p. 428.

Outras vistas em The Faith of Vincent Van Gogh                                                                                     

One Way Street - Fragments For Walter Benjamin (1993)

Cazuza - Burguesia

Don Cherry - I've Grown Accustomed To Your Face

José Alberto Quaresma: "O professor deve ser um burocrata triste"

"Os professores portugueses são no conjunto dos países da OCDE dos que mais horas de aulas dão por ano. Do estudo exaustivo da OCDE, "Education at a Glance 2012, OECD Indicators", o Expresso deu eco resumido. Poucos ligaram.
Os dados lá estão acessíveis neste documento de 570 páginas. Desalentam o brio luso. E desmentem o anátema que tem sido lançado sobre a situação de privilégio dos docentes portugueses. Ficam bastante acima da média europeia em excesso de trabalho. Ou, se quisermos ser mais precisos, estão bastante em baixo. Mais deprimidos ainda é possível.
Trabalham com turmas maiores e permanecem muito mais tempo na escola. A situação tem vindo a agravar-se desde 2000. Para além disto, que não é pouco, vêem a progressão na carreira interrompida há anos, assistem de fúria contida à extorsão dos subsídios, e vêem-se às dezenas de milhar no desemprego.
As escolas entretanto foram alindadas com os dinheiros públicos da Parque Escolar. Mas muitas viram as obras suspensas, por falência dos empreiteiros ou porque o orçamento foi ultrapassado ou cortado. Outras, bastante degradadas, nem puderam iniciar obras prometidas e orçamentadas. Foram expelidas para as calendas gregas.
E mesmo nas mais modernaças, onde entra luz a rodos, o ambiente no seu interior é soturno e de cortar à faca, dizem-me antigos colegas.
Os professores são submergidos com trabalho burocrático inglório. A sua opinião nada conta. São-lhes exigidos relatórios e mais relatórios que ninguém lê e cujo único fito parece ser o de arranjar papelada para uma futura inspecção do Ministério da Educação certificar que vai tudo maravilhoso.
Para as questões didácticas e pedagógicas, as verdadeiramente importantes, não há tempo. E cada vez menos vontade. A desmotivação é persistente. E só por excesso de auto-mutilação profissional, e sacrifício familiar, a esmagadora maioria dos professores não deixa de acorrer com afecto e zelo aos seus alunos.
O Ministério da Educação exige de um professor que seja um burocrata. Não um pedagogo. Que preencha formulários a eito, que planifique milimetricamente as aulas, que avalie com balança de precisão, como quem pesa a dose, o que é vago, impreciso e inquantificável. No fundo que se desenrasque e tente encher o olho a quem, entediado, passe os olhos por cima de umas linhas e de uns excelsos quadros em excel. Em última instância, que endromine através de uma grelha, de um escala de valores pseudo-científica, de um jargão administrativo, o "eduquês", que um homem sensato promovido a ministro de um governo medíocre agora não pode arrasar.
Com esta sanha administrativa as vítimas são as mesmas de sempre, os alunos oriundos de meios socio-culturais desfavorecidos que chegam mal à escola. E mal por ela passam, divertidos, a caminho de um lugar vazio. Mas muitos outros que investem o melhor do seu esforço para irem acabar a passar códigos de barras em grandes superfícies, tarefa para a qual se qualificaram em universidades de prestígio e outras nem por isso.
É este o futuro que nos vão vendendo, barato, baratinho. Uma marca branca para usar até à idade madura ou até cair de maduro. E quem lá chegar que se amanhe."

 Jornal Expresso, 20 de Dezembro de 2012

Edmund Youngbauer, Die Jagd Nach Dem Glück (fins do séc. xix)

Via Darrin McMahon, The Pursuit of Happiness (Penguin, 2007), p.354.