One of the best Brazilian writers is little known. His name is Gustavo Corção (1896–1978). Have you heard of him? Like Nelson Rodrigues, he was not elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters. His work, * Lições do Abismo* (Lessons from the Abyss ), is on par with any classic of world literature. Born at the end of the 19th century, Corção was a legitimate critic of the 20th century, which he referred to as * The Century of Nothingness *, the title of his last book. If readers, like me, are children of the 1900s, I strongly recommend Corção's work. * The Century of Nothingness * is his intellectual testament. In it, we find, in our language, the origins of the evils we experience today. Corção didn't need a crystal ball to predict the future; he simply extracted the consequences from ideas.
Sometimes I wonder what Corção would call this century, marked by the negation not only of being, but of any nature. This evil, naturally, extends to human institutions. Currently, they all converge on a single thing, abandoning their respective "reasons for being" to meddle in everything or, paradoxically, in nothing. They are metamorphosing into "NGOs," in the pejorative sense of the term. Those who, following Saint Augustine, believed that "peace is the tranquility of order," now live tormented. Nothing is in order. Everything is upside down, literally. How to maintain mental sanity in such a context? Starting from this line of reasoning and observing reality, I have come to a conclusion: this is " The Century of Madness ." People are getting sick and going mad because it is no longer possible to find peace anywhere.
In searching the history of Western civilization, I unfortunately find no parallel. Throughout history, however chaotic and belligerent, men knew who they were and respected the nature of things. Institutions, even the most corrupt, recognized their limits and adhered to their "raison d'être." Any deviation was prudently rejected. However, the ideas that have brought us to this point were conceived over the last, let's say, 500 years. Today, they are like implicit premises. We don't see them clearly because we take them as hegemonic truths. Hence the urgency of reading Corção, especially * The Century of Nothing* . We cannot forget that the first step to correcting an error is to recognize it.
This text does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Unicamp.
