The Beauty of the Unpredictable
Ricardo T. Ricci en: ARS MEDICA https://ars-medica.mn.co/posts/the-beauty-of-the-unpredictable
Reading, reading, and reading… an endless source of revelations. Walking along the paths where we can still find the footprints of great writers and the literary critics who knew them by heart, is a fascinating experience.
Now, we are the ones invited to make our small contribution to this river of creativity sharing reflections, aphorisms, short stories and poems, everything adds up.
That is what this essay is about; the causes and effects of reading and writing; about the situations and the implications of humans and their circumstances. It's about the unexpected consequences that reading generates; reading King Lear or The Tempest by Shakespeare can have a much greater impact in our lives than the prophecies attached to the wrapper of my favorite chewing gum I read in my childhood.
“Greater than scene… is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.” *
I once came across the phrase: "The map is not the territory," which suggests the description of the thing is not the thing itself. It is not the same standing in front of the Iguazú Falls and staring at the scene with your very own eyes, than looking at a map of the border between Brazil and Argentina, a brochure of the National Park, or a photograph of the falls on National Geographic. There is no information that could replace the beauty that fills your eyes, that continuous roar of water that rushes in uncontrollable streams, the humid feeling of fine droplets of water falling on your face, your hair, and your clothes.
The map is not the territory. It is incomparably different to be situated on the scene; the feeling of involvement surpasses everything as we become one with the surroundings. We are involved, we are part of the experience. The basalt stone, the multiform ferns, the coati and the toucan are part of the falls, and once
we are there, we are too. If you pause for a moment to think about it, you immediately feel astonished.
There is no greater joy than to contemplate the entire human being. The grace and the struggles of the lay person, pretentious and insecure, arrogant and humble. The human that has the ability to hold and appraise the beauty of the territory, to design the map and remain irrepressible to any frames. A mass of flesh and bones, a sentient apparatus, a will, an arrow thrown into the immensity and immense in itself.
The human being that emerges as a continent of the self. A self-penetrated by feelings, emotions, reasons, desires and actions. A self that is both uncontainable and continent at the same time. A being confronted with the fragility of existence, uncertain and powerful. A heap of matter capable of containing the universe and imagining what the collision between Andromeda and the Milky Way will be like, which will occur in several billions of years’ time.
A being embedded in space and time, a being involved in the scenes, as we saw, and involved in time, with a biography, a story and a narrative of its own.
*Quotes extracted from brainpickings.org
Eudora Alice Welty (Jackson (Mississippi, April 13, 1909 - July 23, 2001) was an American writer who wrote novels and short stories about the South of the United Stated of American. Welty won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for his novel The Optimist's Daughter. She was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
Ricardo T. Ricci, translated by Mariana Dittborn
