character

The gap between what is private and what is public has diminished to the point at which one can almost say that it has ceased to exist.
Is much of the world childhood itself has been abolished, childhood defined as safe, protected period during which a human can grow, learn, develop, play and become—in which a human being can be childlike, childish, and be spared the rigours of adulthood. These days global poverty forces children to work in factories and in fields. It turns children into street urchins, criminals and whores. Meanwhile, political instability not only claims children’s lives in large numbers—in Sudan, in Rwanda, in India, in Iraq—but turns them into killers, too. See on TV the child soldiers of Africa toting their automatic weapons and speaking with terrifying ease about death. At a time when the external pressures upon us are so great, in Palestine, in Israel, in Afghanistan, in Iran, many artists have felt obliged to take into account the terrible truth that for a great majority of the world’s population, their characters, strong or weak, have very little chance of determining their fates. Poverty is destiny, war is destiny, ancient ethnic, tribal and religious hatreds are destiny, a bomb on a bus or in a market square is destiny, and character just has to take its place on the list. A billionaire financial speculator attacks your country currency, and it collapses, and you lose your job; it doesn’t matter who you are or how good a worker you were, you’re on the street. Not is this simply a Third World problem. On September 11, 2001, thousands of people died for reasons unconnected with their characters. On that sad day, their ethos (they way of being in the world) was not their daimon (the guiding principle that shapes their lives).

Salman Rushdie, Heraclitus
Granta nº 100

~ por salamandrine em Agosto 11, 2008.