I had decided, with my own heart, to read and comment on Olavo de Carvalho after the dust had settled – which, I believed, would only happen after he died , and look there. The resolution came from the fact that the fan club was very boring and more prone to shouting than dialogue. So, if you took a look at best seller
organized by Felipe Moura Brasil, soon came the shouting that he couldn’t comment on that without having read hundreds of other books or listened to all the millions of hours of COF. In other words: if I read, I would have to keep my observations to myself, because there would be no one to talk to. But the curious thing is that it was not necessary for Olavo to die for the dust to settle. I believe this happened around the Fake News Inquiry. At first, I thought it was simply out of fear on the part of the olavetes, who began to be persecuted by the STF. However, the same inquiry was preceded by an internal betrayal of the movement, which consisted in the delivery, by the supporters of Luciano Ayan, of names from the right to the STF. Today I already raise the possibility that Olavo’s discussion was deliberately derailed by an infiltrated group. Olavo and his honest pupils lacked the foresight to realize that aggressive rhetoric led to Olavo’s ideas being preached only to converts. After all, when the Olavete mob forces the reader to worship Olavo’s personality, it becomes impossible for people like me to discuss his work. I followed Flavio Gordon and considered that Olavo’s philosophy is condensed in the trilogy A Nova Era and the Cultural Revolution
(2014 ), O Ibecil Coletivo (1996) and The Garden of Afflictions
(1995). Despite the chronology, the logical order is this. So I started with The New Age and the Cultural Revolution , subtitled “Fritjof Capra & Antonio Gramsci”. If there’s an advantage to dead authors, it’s that they don’t change their minds and won’t create new editions that make the ones we have obsolete. So I have the definitive one, which is the “4th edition, revised and greatly enlarged”, of Vide Editorial, launched in 2014 . What to say to the non-reader of Olavo de Carvalho that only the know because of the screaming? Who, judging by this book, is an enjoyable and thought-provoking writer, good to read on the weekend to unwind and think. Olavo de Carvalho is an excellent culturist of the Portuguese language, something that has been rare among us. Besides, I dare say that one of the reasons why he has become popular in Brazil is his style as a columnist. I have already commented in this newspaper the curious fact that Brazil is the only country in the world where Dalrymple is pop. The explanation I offered for this is his chronicler style. Typically, a successful Brazilian writer writes for a newspaper, and among us there is the custom of making books with a selection of newspaper texts. It is like this with José Guilherme Merquior, with Carlos Drummond de Andrade, with João Ubaldo Ribeiro, with Luís Fernando Veríssimo. Political scientists and poets, leftists and rightists, are above all, among us, chroniclers. Before making the Internet boom, Olavo was within that typical profile of a Brazilian man of letters. The danger of consecrating the chronicle as a favorite literary style is getting lost in the dust of time. We could think that Brazil is in a bad spot because of this, but I think it’s just the opposite. After all, Polzonoff has already commented a few times in this newspaper on the process of chronicling literature: instead of aspiring to immortality with a great novel, writers dedicate themselves to the most ephemeral things. I, for my part, can point to a process of chronification of the humanities: it is difficult to discuss political theory in a more abstract way looking at classics and expanding the temporal scope when we are buried by polemics and slogans all the time. I believe that chronicity is a result of the volatility of our time. It’s not the internet’s fault, since in the 1990’s 1994, in a climate of World War II, Bernanos already complained about the flood of slogans.
That era was politically atypical and so is ours. There is a kind of psychological bombing going on that messes with our perception of time and makes us think only in the short term. It is a great loss, as it prevents us from seeing the picture of events in their entirety; it’s as if we only had maps of neighborhoods instead of a world map. If the facts overwhelm us, it is natural that we make a few chronicles instead of going straight to great definitive texts. Chronicles always run the risk of getting lost in the dust of time, but, I believe, they are the only textual genre in a position to catch this torrent of petty facts. Therefore, if there is a way to organize them in our heads, that way is through the chronicle. The New Age and the Cultural Revolution Nevertheless, the chronicler Olavo notes the fact , digests it and exposes Capra’s ideological traits that range from the abolition of patriarchy to the war against the use of oil as an energy matrix. I would never bother to look at what such a passing figure as Capra has written; however, Olavo, the chronicler, retains a fact in the midst of all that volatility, and Olavo, the philosopher, thinks about them. This thought, which domesticates the facts dispersed in the dust of time, helps us to see the current situation within a series that began in 1994. Today I stretched. The notes on the book are due tomorrow.Which work to start with?
Olavo, the philosopher-chronist
