sexta-feira, 1 de agosto de 2014

Fé versus conhecimento





Pessoal, acabei de ler um conto maravilhoso, chamado A Mother’s Tale, escrito por James Agge e que me foi indicado pelo meu caro amigo, Enzo Potel, também escritor.


De fato, o conto é uma maravilha, como advertiu- me Potel. Mesmo em inglês, a leitura é fácil, direta e sem muito “eruditismo” literário. O relato é de quem está falando para crianças. Agee escreve a história de uma mãe, que diante de seu filho e demais jovens, narra, após os questionamentos de seu filho “What are they doing? Where are they going?”, o que acontece com um agrupamento que se dirige para um trem, carregado de vagões. O entusiasmo e a ânsia estão presentes nesses questionamentos, próprias dos jovens sedentos de conhecimentos. Há uma notória presença da representação do que seja ter fé e acreditar através dela e acreditar através do conhecimento. Ambos estão embutidos na história contada pela mãe e que lhe foi contada pela sua avó e bisavó através dos tempos. 

Ah, o melhor é que mãe em questão é uma vaca e o seu filho, um bezerro. Os outros jovens são bezerrinhos também curiosos como ele.

Eis aqui duas páginas do conto:



A Mother's Tale
By James Agee


The calf ran up the hill as fast as he could and stopped sharp. "Mama!" he cried, all out of breath. "What is
it! What are they doing '! Where are they going!"
Other spring calves came galloping too.
They all were looking up at her and awaiting her explanation, but she looked out over their excited eyes. As she watched the mysterious and majestic thing they had never seen before, her own eyes became even more than ordinarily still, and during the considerable moment before she answered, she scarcely heard their urgent questioning.
Far out along the autumn plain, beneath the sloping light, an immense drove of cattle moved eastward. They went at a walk, not very fast, but faster than they could imaginably enjoy. Those in front were compelled by those behind; those at the rear, with few exceptions, did their best to keep up; those who were locked within the herd could no more help moving than the particles inside a falling rock. Men on horses rode ahead, and alongside, and behind, or spurred their horses intensely back and forth, keeping the pace steady, an   d the herd in shape; and from man to man a dog sped back and forth-, incessantly as a shuttle, barking, incessantly, in a hysterical voice. Now and then one of the men shouted fiercely, and this like the shrieking of the dog was tinily audible above a low and awesome sound which seemed to come not from the multitude of hooves but from the center of the world, and above the sporadic bawlings and bellowings of the herd.
From the hillside this tumult was so distant that it only made more delicate the prodigious silence in which the earth and sky were held; and, from the hill, the sight was as modest as its sound. The herd was virtually hidden in the dust it raised and could be known) in general, only by the horns which pricked this flat sunlit dust like little briar. In one place a twist of the air revealed the trembling fabric of many backs; but it was only along the near edge of the mass that individual animals were discernible, small in a driven frieze, walking fast, stumbling and recovering, tossing their armed heads, or opening their skulls heavenward in one of those cries which reached the hillside long after the jaws were shut.
From where she watched, the mother could not be sure whether there were any she recognized. She knew that among them there must be a son of hers; she had not seen him since some previous spring, and she would not be seeing him again. Then the cries of the young ones impinged on her bemusement: "Where are they going?"
She looked into their ignorant eyes. "Away," she said.
"Where?" they cried. "Where? Where?" her own son cried again. She wondered what to say.
"On a long journey."
"But where to?" they shouted. "Yes, where to?" her son exclaimed; -and she could see that he was losing his patience with her, as he always did when he felt she was evasive.
"I'm not sure," she said.
Their silence was so cold that she was unable to avoid their eyes for long.
'Well, not really sure. Because, you see," she said in her most reasonable tone, I've never seen it with my own eyes, and thats the only way to be sure; isnt it?



They just kept looking at her. She could see no way out.
"But I've heard about it," she said with shallow cheerfulness, "from those who have seen it, and I don't suppose there's any good reason to doubt them."
She looked away over them again, and for all their interest in what she was about to tell them, her eyes so changed that they turned and looked too.
The herd, which had been moving broadside to them, was being turned away, so slowly that like the turning of stars it could not quite be seen from one moment to the next; yet soon it was moving directly away from them, and even during the little while she spoke and they all watched after it, it steadily and very noticeably diminished, and the sounds of it as well
"It happens always about this time of year," she said quietly while they watched. "Nearly all the men and horses leave, and go into the North and the West."
"Out on the range," her son said, and by his voice she knew what enchantment the idea already held for him.
"Yes," she said, "out on the range." And trying, impossibly, to imagine the range, they were touched by the breath of grandeur.
"And then before long," she continued, "everyone has been found, and brought into one place; and then . . . what you see, happens. All of them.
"Sometimes when the wind is right," she said more quietly, "you can hear them coming long before you can see them It isn't even like a sound, at first. It's more as if something were moving far under the ground. It makes you uneasy. You wonder, why what in the world can that be! Then you remember what it is and then you can really hear it. And then finally, there they all are.
She could see this did not interest them at all. "But where are they going?" one asked, a little impatiently. "I'm coming to that," she said; and she let them wait. Then she spoke slowly but casually. .
"They are on their way to a railroad."
There, she thought; that's for that look you all gave me,"-hen I said I wasn't sure. She waited for them to ask:
they waited for her to ex- plain.
"A railroad," she told them, "is great hard bars of metal lying side by side, or so they tell me, and they go on and on over the ground as far as the eye can see. And great wagons run on the metal bars on wheels like wagon wheels but smaller, and these wheels are made of solid metal too. The wagons are much bigger than any wagon you've ever seen, as big as, big as sheds, they say, and they are pulled along on the iron bars by a terrible huge dark machine, with a loud scream."
"Big as sheds?" one of the calves said skeptically.
"Big enough, anyway," the mother said. "I told you I've never seen it myself. But those wagons are so big that several of us can get inside at once. And that's exactly what happens."
Suddenly she became very quiet, for she felt that somehow, she could not imagine just how, she had said altogether too much.
"Well, what happens?" her son wanted to know. "'What do you mean, happens?"
She always tried hard to be a reasonably modern mother. It was probably better, she felt, to go on, than to leave them all full of imaginings and mystification. Besides, there was really nothing at all awful about what happened . . . if only one could know why.

Continua, é só copiar e colar: http://arkfl.rescuegroups.org/info/file?file=s3232m5986.pdf

2 comentários:

Enzo Potel disse...

Helinho! Que legal que você gostou a ponto de sentir vontade de passar adiante, como aconteceu comigo!
E o Agee tem poucos contos, acho que três. O romance dele "A morte na família" é bem bom, alguns capítulos são geniais.
O livro mais famoso dele, "Elogiemos os homens ilustres", é estranhamente jornalístico, eu detestei.

axé!

Hélio Jorge Cordeiro disse...

Então, Potel, às vezes batemos de frente, ás vezes seguimos em frente, caminhando e cantando e seguindo o refrão! Valeu, cara!