Opinion – Marcelo Leite: Even if it goes bad, the second round will pass, like everything else

The announcements of the Nobel prizes until Thursday (6) had brought two joys, and it was not with physics or chemistry, for a change difficult. Literature and medicine gave more to think about, including the accusation that the laurel represents the highest level of arrogant, white and sexist knowledge.

In literature, Annie Ernaux, a feminist who renewed autobiographical writing and, as I learned from Juliana Cunha, was ignored by critics in her own country. I was lucky enough to debut with her the catalog of Fósforo Editora, when I saw my “Psychonauts” launched in 2021.

Ernaux, 82, narrated in “O Acontecimento” the clandestine abortion he had had at 23. Fernanda Diamant and Rita Mattar, from Fósforo, had the courage to publish the book (and three others) in a country where this topic became anathema and the French it was almost unknown.

In the medicine prize, Svante Pääbo, 67, a bisexual Swede who bears the unfamiliar surname of his Estonian mother and unraveled the genome of Neanderthals, reported Reinaldo José Lopes, a companion in this space. Once painted as brutes, thanks to Pääbo it is now known that we all carry some of the DNA of these hominins.

Our distant cousins ​​walked the Earth for 1 million years, up to about 40,000 years ago. Plenty of time to mix with specimens of Homo sapiensancestors who bequeathed most of our genes, and also enough to show the insignificance of the historical moment lived in Brazil.

What are four years of Jair Messias Bolsonaro (or eight of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for that matter) in the face of such a long evolution and such a profound time? Commas in a book, if that.

In between Nobel announcements, I was also graced with the reading of a beautiful text by Sigmund Freud (one more), from 1916, chosen for the German class by her goddaughter Elisa Dourado. The title is “Transience,” and it speaks of loss and grief; could be talking about Bolsonaro’s Brazil.

Freud begins by narrating a certain walk on a summer day in the company of a poet. Flowers and light everywhere, but the friend begins to regret that so much beauty must perish.

“Everything else that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be deprived of value by the transience that was the destiny of everything”, reads in Paulo César de Souza’s translation for Companhia das Letras.

The creator of psychoanalysis disagrees, with the wisdom and elegance that his critics today lack. “It turns out that this demand for immortality is so clearly a product of our desires that it cannot claim reality value. Even what is painful can be true”, he ponders.

“I could not make up my mind to refute universal transience, nor obtain an exception for the beautiful and the perfect. But I challenged the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience of the beautiful implies its devaluation. (…) The limitation of possibility of fruition increases its preciousness.”

Freud then reveals that the tour took place shortly before the First World War, which destroyed so much beauty and hope. Sound familiar? But it’s just as transitory, he teaches, and grieving the loss can also be liberating.

“Once the mourning is over, we will realize that our high esteem for cultural assets has not suffered from the discovery of their precariousness. We will rebuild everything that the war destroyed, and perhaps on firmer ground and in a more lasting way than before.”

Not as steady as World War II proved, but this one too is over. Even if everything goes bad again in the second round, everything will pass — once again.