The Notebook. José Saramago
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is this soul for us to put into cuffs and send off to trial? Yes, we can show that the hammer that destroyed the victim’s skull was wielded by this hand, but if the hand that killed might have just as readily—or unconsciously—held out a flower, how can we incriminate it? Does the flower absolve the hammer?
I mentioned above that will, need, desire (synonyms that, strictly speaking, cannot be kept apart) cannot be specifically located in the body. That much is certain. No one can state, for example, that the will is to be found between the middle and index finger of the hand that is currently employed in strangling someone with the help of its partner to the left. However, we all imagine that if the will has a home, and it must, then it can only be inside the brain, that highly complex universe (the cerebral cortex is about five millimeters thick and contains seventy thousand million nerve cells arranged in six interconnected layers) whose function still largely remains to be studied. We are the brain we have at any given moment, and that is the only essential truth we can state about ourselves. What, then, is the will? Is it something material? I cannot imagine, do not think anyone could imagine, what sort of argument you could use to defend the alleged materiality of the will without presenting some material demonstration of that same materiality. . .
Voluntarism, as is widely known, is the theory that maintains that the will is the basis of being, the root of action, and, in addition, the essential function of animal life. Voluntarist tendencies are already to be found in classical antiquity in Aristotelianism and Stoicism. In contemporary philosophy, voluntarists include Schopenhauer (will as the essence of the world, but beyond cognitive representation) and Nietzsche (the will to power as a principle for achieving success in life). This is a serious matter, and all the evidence requires someone here (not the person writing these lines) who is capable of relating these and other philosophical reflections on the will to the contents of this book, whose title, let us not forget, is The Torturers’ Soul. I should perhaps have stopped here, to the benefit of my sense of honor, had my eyes not lighted—my hand leafing distracted through a humble dictionary—on the following definition: “Will. The capacity for determining to do or not to do something. Liberty is rooted in it.” Nothing could be clearer, as you see: through my will I can determine to do or not to do something, and liberty renders me free to determine myself one way or another. Since language has accustomed us to consider the will and liberty as inherently positive concepts, we are suddenly aware of an instinctive fear that the sparkling medals that we call liberty and will can show the complete and utter opposite on their reverse sides. It was through the use of his freedom (shocking though the use of this word might seem to us in such a context) that General Videla became, through his own will—I insist on that, through his own will—one of the most loathsome participants in the bloody and seemingly unending world history of torture and murder. It was likewise by using their will and their freedom that the Argentine torturers carried out their dreadful work. They wanted to do it, and they did it. So no forgiveness is possible. No national or personal reconciliation is possible.
Knowing whether or not they have souls does not matter much. In fact, the person who should know most about this subject is the Argentine Catholic priest Christian von Vernich, who a few months ago was sentenced to life imprisonment for genocide. His service record shows six murders, the torture of thirty-four people, and forty-two cases of kidnapping. And if I might be allowed a tragic irony, it is even possible that at some point he gave one of his victims the last rites. . .
October 24: José Luis Sampedro
This afternoon I heard mention of José Luis Sampedro, an economist, a writer, and above all a wise man, with the sagacity that doesn’t come with age (though age can help a little) but from reflection as a way of life. He was asked on television about the crisis of ’29, which he experienced as a child and which he subsequently studied as an academic. He gave intelligent answers, which anyone interested in understanding what is going on will find in his books (he has written so much, José Luis Sampedro), or by seeking out his journalism on the Web, but there was one question that he himself—rather than the interviewer—asked, and which remained engraved in my memory. The master asked us, and himself, how to explain why the money used to rescue the banks appeared so quickly and was given unconditionally, and whether this money would have appeared with the same speed had it been solicited to help with an emergency in Africa, or to fight AIDS. . . It did not take us long to guess the answer. The economy we can save, but not the human being, who should take absolute priority, whoever and wherever he or she may be. José Luis Sampedro is a great humanist as well as an exemplar of lucidity. Contrary to what is sometimes said, the world is not completely lacking in deserving people like him, so we should pay him careful attention. And do what he tells us: intervene, intervene, intervene.
October 27: When I Grow Up I Want to Be like Rita
The Rita I want to be like when I grow up is Rita Levi-Montalcini, winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1984 for her research into the development of neural cells. Given that I already have a Nobel Prize, it is not with any ambition for that greater or lesser glory (opinions of those in the know are divided) that I am ready to stop being who I am in order to become Rita. Increasingly so, since I am of an age when any sort of change, however promising, always seems to be a sacrifice of the routines that we more or less all end up adopting.
So why do I want to be like Rita? It’s simple. At her investiture as a Doctor (Honoris Causa), delivering the inaugural lecture of the Complutense University in Madrid, this woman, who will be a hundred years old in April, made a few statements (a shame we weren’t able to get hold of a complete transcript of her improvised speech) that left me alternately amazed and grateful, however hard it is to imagine these two extreme feelings together and united. She said: “I have never thought about myself. Living or dying, they’re the same thing. Because naturally, life is not in this little body. What matters is the way in which we live and the message we leave behind. That is what survives us. That is immortality.” And she said too, “The obsession with aging is ridiculous. My brain is better now than it was when I was young. It’s true that I don’t see well and my hearing is even worse, but my head has always worked well. The crucial thing is always to keep the brain active, to try to help others and retain your curiosity about the world.” And these words, which made me feel as if I had found a kindred spirit: “I am against reform or any other kind of subsidy. I have survived without it. In 2001 I didn’t earn a thing and I had money problems until President Ciampi named me Senator for Life.”
Not everyone agrees with such radicalism. But I would bet that many of you reading this will also want to be like Rita when you grow up. So be it. If you do we can be sure that the world will soon change for the better. Is that not what we have been saying we want? Rita is the way to do it.
October 28: Fernando Meirelles & Co.
The story of the adaptation of Ensaio sobre a cegueira2 for the cinema has been filled with highs and lows since Fernando Meirelles, in 1997 or thereabouts, asked Luiz Schwarcz, my Brazilian editor, if I might be interested in giving up the rights to it. He received a peremptory negative as a reply: No. However, in the offices of my literary agent in Bad Homburg, Frankfurt, a heavy shower began and lasted for years, a shower of letters, e-mails, telephone calls, messages from every kind of producer from other countries, in particular from the United States, asking the same question. I had them all given the same answer: No. Was this arrogance? No, it wasn’t a question of arrogance; it was just that I wasn’t sure, or even hopeful, that the book would be treated with respect. So the years went by. Then one day two Canadians turned up in Lanzarote, accompanied by my agent; they had come straight from Toronto, and they were hoping to make the film: Niv Fichman, the producer, and Don McKellar, the scriptwriter. They belonged to a new generation, neither of them reminded me of Cecil B. de Mille, and after a frank conversation, without any hidden trapdoors and without any mental reservations, I gave them the job. We still didn’t know who the director would be. More years would have to pass before the day