«The real me, I decided, existed in those hours when literature and philosophy passed through my hands uncomprehended. And because I understood nothing, every word invested with enormous power - a power of destiny, as though my life now ran in channels marked out by the visionaries who had 'foreseen and foresuffered all'. An air of holiness, a reckless disregard for the world and its requirements seemed to radiate from those mysterious pages. They referred me to a place where justification was no longer needed and where it was sufficient just to be.
At the same time, a sadness grew in me, a sense that something was wrong with the world. Science, progress and money had prevented people from observing this thing; I too had been blind to its existence, so lost had I been in the world's concerns. But my feeling testified to its reality. Sadness looked out at me from art and literature, like the pitying face of a painted saint. I encountered it in the words of Rilke, I saw it in the mad paintings of Van Gogh, and I heard it, via Mr Chapman's gramophone, in the infinite, still spaces of Beethoven's last quartets - spaces made through sound, in which, however, there reigns a greater silence than can be heard in any desert.»
Roger Scruton, Gentle Regrets. Uma companhia não como qualquer outra.
