The other day, my colleague Mirian Goldenberg took those words out of my mouth. She said that with or without AI, she would continue to write. That’s exactly what I meant. I haven’t done anything else in almost 100 years and it’s hard to let go of old habits. Besides, I don’t know how to do anything else: I’ve never driven a car, I can barely change a light bulb and I don’t even know how to cook pasta. The time I could have spent developing these skills was spent reading people who wrote well and trying to learn from them.
Just like prehistoric children, I started writing on the walls, not in caves and with a mammoth rib dipped in blood, but in the living room, and with a pencil. Soon I reached the typewriter and, still almost hairless, found myself in a newspaper office. Rio then had 15 daily newspapers, but I was in exactly what I wanted: the heroic Correio da Manhã. It was my introduction to the battle between print and obscurantism, in this case won by the latter. The journal was destroyed by the military regime following AI-5 in 1968, but it would develop in us, its orphans, a thick skin that would serve us forever.
From there, I covered a number of vehicles and, which is not very common in the profession, I am proud to have never created a line that I did not believe in. Of course, I regret a lot of them, but at the time they seemed right to me. I also want to believe that there is consistency between them: I challenge a future researcher to find, in thousands of articles, columns and reports, a compliment to a leader.
Nor will he find in his drawers a single page that he can describe as “unpublished”, unpublished. Poems, therefore, no question: out of respect for the poets I admire, I have never written any in my life. Everything I’ve produced so far has been written to release tomorrow, next week, three months from now, or next year. Everything has a designated destination: newspaper columns, a report for a magazine, a book already planned by the publisher.
The problem, Mirian, will be: what to do in the afterlife?
PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click on the blue F below.
About The Author
