First and last things, H.G. Wells

First and last things, H.G. Wells

Ultimamente ando muito "Wellziana"... não só porque fiz um download imenso, via projecto Gutenberg, de livros do Wells em formato plucker (o que me permite lê-los confortavelmente no palm), mas principalmente porque sinto uma afinidade imensa com esta escrita... se gosto dos livros do Wells em geral, este é sem duvida um dos meus favoritos. É um livro muito pessoal, e muito abrangente, ou como o autor começa por explicar "Recently, I set myselft to put down what I believe". Aqui ficam algumas das passagens que achei particularmente deliciosas...

What am I? Here is a question to which in all ages men have sought to give a clear unambiguous answer, and to which a a clear unambiguous answer is manifestly unfitted. Am I my body? Yes or no? It seems to me that I can externalize and think of as "not myself" nearly everything that pertains to my body, hands and feet, and even the most secret and central of those living and hidden parts, the pusing arteries, the throbing nerves, the ganglionic centres, that no eye, save for the surgeon's knife has ever seen or ever will see until they coagulate in decay. So far I am not my body; and then as clearly, since I suffer through it, see the whole world through it and am always to be called upon where it is, I am it. Am I a ind misteriously linked to this thing of matter and endeavour?

We are all engaged, each contributing from his or her own standpoint, in the collective synthesis; whatever one can best do, one must do that; in whatever manner one can best help the synthesis, one most exert oneself; the setting apart of oneself, secrecy, the service of secret and personal ends, is the waste of life and the essential quality of Sin.

The general duty of a man, his existence being secured, is to educate and chiefly to educate and develop himself. It is his duty to live, to make all he can out of himself and life, to get full of experience, to make himself fine and perceiving and expressive, to render his experience and perceptions honestly and hepfully to others.

Correlated with one's own intellectual activity, part of it and growing out of it for almost everyone, is intellectual work with and upon others. By teaching we learn.

Love may be, and is for the most part, one-sided. It is the going out from oneself that is love, and not the accident of it's return. It is the expedition whether it fail or succeed. But an expedition starves that comes to no port. Love always seeks mutuality and grows by the sense of responses, or we should love beautiful inanimate things more passionately than we do. Falling a full return, it makes the most of an inadequate return. Failling a sustained return, it welcomes a temporary coincidence. Failling a return, it finds support in accepted sacrifices. But it seeks a full return, and the fullness of life has come to those who, loving, have met the lover.

Love is a thing to a large extent in its beginnings voluntary and controllable, and at last quite involuntary. It is so hedged about by obligations and consequences, real and artificial, that for the most part I think people are overmuch afraid of it. And also the tradition of sentiment that suggests its forms and guides it in the world about us, is far too strongly exclusive. It is not so much when love is glowing that it is jealous for itself and others. Lovers a little exhausting their mutual interest find a fillip in an alliance against the world. They bury their talent of understanding and sympathy to return it duly in a clean napkin. They narrow their interest in life lest the other lover should misunderstand their amplitude as disloyalty. Our institutions and social costums seem all to assume a definiteness of preference, a singleness and a limitation of love, which is not psychologically justifiable. People do not, I think, fall naturally into agreement with these assumptions; they train themselves to agreement. They take refuge from experiences that seem to carry with them the risk at least of perplexing situations, in a theory of barred possibilities and locked doors. How far this shy and cultivated irresponsive lovelessness towards the world at large may not carry with it the possibility of compensating intensities, I do not know. Quite equally probable is a starvation of one's emotional nature.