Rafael Barret "Acts of Hope"

Acts of Hope

Analyze the virile virtues and you will discover that they amount to one: Hope. We would never be constant, heroic, truthful, patient, if we didn’t hope, if didn’t hope our flesh, our intelligence, our occult being, if we didn’t trust, even during agony, in the fruits of time. The time walks without looking back; everything is permitted to him except regret and undo his work. We can’t do more than advance. The universe does not retrocedes. ¿How not fill ourselves with hope? ¿How we not foresee the marvelous possibilities? ¿How not feel the continuous imminence of the new, of what to nothing will resemble? We believed that one must not wait more than the gods; that only they are sacred. Error: everything is sacred, everything collaborates, since everything lives. We are sacred in first term; the nature hasn’t revealed us until today no factor as prodigious as man. Let’s admire ourselves; let’s hope in ourselves. Let’s learn to venerate the mysteries that our spirit encloses and to trust in its incalculable potency.


 

The evil is profoundly insignificant, because it is not capable to stop the world. Let’s not give too much value to the evils we did; Let us not remember too much the moments in which the notion of our destiny darkened. Let’s drive away the sterile pains, the remorse, the idea of sin, the mania of the expiation. We are not sinners, we are not guilty; the greatest and more stupid of sins would be to punish ourselves or punishing others. We are not inmates or judges; We are workers. Let’s not attribute to evil a consistency he doesn’t have; let’s kill him with forget. Our heart is clean; Let us rise up happy and agile in the design of good. One minute of good overrides the crimes of history. And let’s forget with equal serenity the evil and the good that passed. If we were saints or delinquents, ¿What does it matter? We are no longer what we were. We wake up another every morning. ¿Who said that in our life does not return the spring? Returns lovingly upon us innumerable springs. We always renew ourselves; Living is renewing oneself. Let’s forget the ghost; let’s hope in the only thing that exists: in the future.

And let’s forget as well the evil and the good that they did to us. Let us be grand enough to love without cause. Besides, the sincere man deserves to suffer. As much as he errs, he carries in himself an atom of that terrible thing; The truth. The human species, with a savage modesty, resists the truth that fecund it, and the sincere man suffers the betrayal of the friends, the persecution of the powefuls, and knows the abandonment and misery. But ¿what are worth his outside disturbances if compared with the divine exaltation of his soul? Who drinks in that sublime cup does not ever heal. And possessed of the drunkenness of good, of the vertigo of the future, we continue the march. Let’s avert our eyes of the night that tilts; let’s set them on the dawn. And if the past attempts to seduce us with his weapon of female, the beauty, let’s reject beauty, and let’s stay with the truth."

You know, i can't avoid feeling that, apart from being as usual a great article from him, this was particularly personal for the life of Barret. Both for his beliefs and ideas about the situation and era in which he lived as for his decisions for his life respecting that, and specially when considering the whole of his biography before  he even came to South America, i think that there is a Wikipedia page about him, but, as informative as wikipedia is, i think it never really should be enough, maybe i will post a biography of him on here some of these days, if i ever feel confident enough about it.

By the way, i encourage (heh, i don't know why i'm pretending to have readers) to post any question, curiosity, doubt or well, pretty much anything about him and his works that you wanna know in the comments, and also of course your interpretations and opinions are more than appreciated (that's what commentaries are for anyway). I hope you have enjoyed it.