because we have lived through this day with him.

"Shukhov has no reason in the world to be happy. The conditions of his life constitute the most terrible form we can imagine of modern misery: a prisoner of the state in the wastes of Siberia with no rights of any kind; reduced to a number in a camp; freezing, half-starved and with little hope of seeing out his sentence. But as we see him at the end of his day, settling down to sleep and preparing for the next of his three thousand, six hundred and fifty-three days of forced labour, he is happy and he tells us so. For all the conditions that have been created - deliberately, officially - to break his spirit and keep him miserable, he is 'content,' as so many of us who enjoy the good life and ought to be are not.

Unlikely as it may seem, Shukhov is our perfect example of the happy man. And we understand his state, and believe him when he tells us he is happy, because we have lived through this day with him.

Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.

Shukhov is not happy because he has solved the problem of 'how to live' - the life he lives is too provisional, to makeshift for that. Or because, as the classical schools would have put it, he has achived self-contaiment, self-sufficiency. Quite the opposite.

What he achives, briefly, intermittently, is moments of self-fulfilment, something different and more accessible, more democratic we might call it, than self-containment. But he achives it only at moments.

He is happy now - who can know what tomorrow or the day after will do to him? He his happy within limits - and this may be a clue to what makes happiness possible for him, or for any of us."

 David Malouf, The Happy Life - The Search for Contentment in the Modern World, Chatto & Windus, 2011, pp.92-94)

 (Para a Daniela!)

Jan Havickszoon Steen, The Sacrifice of Iphigenia - 1671/ "a balbúrdia do eu"

Daqui.

Por sugestão de James Wood, A mecânica da Ficção (tr. mui cuidada de Rogério Casanova, Quetzal, 2010) onde se pode ler:

"O filósofo Bernard Williams preocupava-se bastante com a inadequação da filosofia moral. Grande parte dela, na sua opinião, em particular a que provinha de Kant, erradicava a balbúrdia do eu do debate filosófico. A filosofia, considerava, mostrava uma tendência para encarar todos os conflitos como conflitos de opiniões, que podiam ser facilmente resolvidos, e não como conflitos de desejos, que já não se resolvem facilmente. (...)

(...) Williams estava mais interessado no que ele chamava «dilemas trágicos», nos quais alguém é confrontado com duas exigências morais contraditórias, ambas de igual importância. Agamémnon tem de trair as suas tropas ou sacrificar a sua filha; qualquer uma das acções lhe causará vergonha e arrependimento duradouros. Para Williams, a filosofia moral devia prestar atenção ao tecido da vida emocional em vez de definir o eu, em termos kantianos, como tendo princípios estanques, como sendo consistente e universal. Não, disse Williams, as pessoas são inconsistentes; refazem continuamente os seus princípios; e são determinadas por toda uma séria de factores - genéticos, educacionais, sociais, etc.

(...)

Evidentemente, o romance não dá respostas filosóficas (como disse Tchékhov, é suficiente que coloque as questões certas). No entanto, faz aquilo que Williams pretendia que a filosofia moral fizesse - produz a melhor representação possível da complexidade do nosso tecido moral." (192-195)