Citação - Virginia Woolf

"Os olhos dos outros são prisões; seus pensamentos nossas celas."

Virginia Woolf
Escritora inglesa

Diários uterinos

Os diários são atalhos para a alma de quem os tem. Talvez por isso eu não tenha um: não creio que a minha alma esteja pronta para ser lida por aí. Ainda assim, gosto de ler o diário de outras pessoas – o que é no mínimo irônico, eu sei – e resolvi compartilhar com vocês os itens de uma coleção de diários que um dia pretendo completar para ler várias e várias vezes, do começo ao fim do livro e da vida. Porque além do prazer da leitura curiosa em si, os diários são o material ideal para o livro que estou escrevendo, o “Útero Vazio”, que de uma certa forma nada mais é do que um diário coletivo. Talvez por isso, e não por coincidência, os 4 diários que eu mais desejo ler tenham sido escritos por uterinas muito queridas sobre as quais não me canso de pesquisar:

1) O diário de Virginia Woolf – dividido em 5 volumes (escrito de 1915 a 1941)

Trecho do diário:

“Valha-me Deus! Discutimos quase toda a manhã! E a manhã estava linda e agora desapareceu no Hades para sempre, ferida com as marcas do nosso mau-humor. Quem começou? Quem continuou? Eu sei lá. O que posso dizer é isso: eu fervo em pouca água, e o Leonardo fervilha.” [1]

2) O diário de Virginia Woolf II – “A casa de Carlyle e outros esboços”

Trecho sobre o diário:

"Até 2003, este diário estava esquecido em uma gaveta. A datilografia dos textos tinha sido encomendada pelo marido da escritora, Leonard Woolf, em 1968, a uma jovem chamada Teresa Davies. Mas antes mesmo que Teresa tivesse começado o trabalho, Leonard adoeceu e morreu. Sem saber o que fazer com o caderno de papel pardo, ela o guardou, permanecendo intacto até o ano passado.O diário tem a forma de um bloco de notas e a inscrição "1909" na capa. Mas, ao contrário dos diários posteriores, recheados de acontecimentos, impressões e impropérios, este é um caderno de esboços, divididos em sete capítulos, que revelam uma Virginia Woolf ainda não consagrada, uma autora em formação, uma mulher cheia de dúvidas.” [2]

3) O diário de Frida Kahlo (escrito de 1944 a 1954)

Trecho sobre o diário:

“Ler o diário de Frida Kahlo é inquestionavelmente um ato de transgressão, com certa matriz voyeurista. Este documento constitui a expressão mais íntima dos sentimentos da artista, cuja intenção não foi publicá-lo. Por esta razão cabe catalogá-lo dentro do gênero do diário íntimo, série de anotações de caráter pessoal realizadas por uma mulher. (...)O fato de Frida Kahlo incluir parte da sua obra gráfica no seu diário pessoal converte a este último numa peça quase única entre os “jornais íntimos” dos que se têm conhecimento. Esta coleção de imagens difere do típico caderno de esboços de artista, habitualmente utilizados para guardar traços preliminares de obras posteriores, ou melhor para pôr em formato reduzido a solução de quadros maiores. Só numa ocasião a pintora transformou um desenho realizado a tinta, incluído no diário, num quadro em grande escala. E diferente dos outros, Frida Kahlo deixa de lado os acontecimentos quotidianos e expressa no seu diário – como Virgínia Woolf – uma marca de sentimentos (e imagens) que não se encontra em mais nenhuma outra parte.” [3]

4) O diário de Beatrix Potter

Trecho sobre o diário:

"Na adolescência, Beatrix Potter começou a escrever um diário secreto, em código. Quinze anos após a sua morte, o código pôde ser decifrado. Foi publicado em inglês, sob o título de “Beatrix Potter: A Journal”. [4]

Fontes:
[1] http://virginiawoolf.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/cotidiano-1/

[2] http://srv-net.diariopopular.com.br/03_10_04/ir290902.html
[3] http://www.diariografico.com/htm/outrosautores/Frida/Frida03.htm
[4] http://www.alexsensfuziy.com/2011/04/06/sylvia-plath-escreveu-sobre-virginia-woolf/

Virginia Woolf's voice

This is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf's voice. It is part of a BBC radio broadcast from April 29th, 1937. The talk was called "Craftsmanship" and was part of a series entitled "Words Fail Me".

The audio is accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

The text was published as an essay in "The Death of the Moth and Other Essays" (1942).

Transcript:

…Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past. The splendid word "incarnadine," for example – who can use that without remembering "multitudinous seas"? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the English language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet always mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. Indeed it is not a word until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great poet knows that the word "incarnadine" belongs to "multitudinous seas." To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a whole new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the old English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.

And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, or if you could learn the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper you'd pick up, would tell the truth, or create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing on the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still – do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were un-lectured, un-criticized, untaught? Is our modern Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Well, where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look once more at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems lovelier than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, ranging hither and thither, falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady's reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.

Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling is all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live – the mind – all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think before they use them, and to feel before they use them, but to think and feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as good as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.

Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being many-sided, flashing first this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity, this power to mean different things to different people, that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination…

Sources:

http://atthisnow.blogspot.com/2009/06/craftsmanship-virginia-woolf.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8czs8v6PuI

"A história da oposição dos homens à emancipação das mulheres

é mais interessante talvez

do que a história da própria emancipação."

Virginia Woolf

Escritora Inglesa