Chronicle                               "The Man before the Universe"   

                                                                                                 Celso Piza Pimentel

The whole knowledge gives and it removes at the same time: when, there is a long time behind, ADAM ate the FORBIDDEN FRUIT; he KNEW that was nude and is LOST the paradise of the EDEN.

Like this, the man, little by little, discovered the skies, the stars, the worlds. And, little by little he went losing the safety of a whole earth to his whole disposal, with a sun rolling in the sky to illuminate the world for him.

Yes, the man discovered that his world is an insignificant ball, a powder twirling in an immense and silent universe. And, as in a nightmare, sees him rotating lonely, in the middle of the space.

"Well, well..., the Earth is nothing: is a minimum, you will say, but, and the Sun? Radiant star, daily star of our world. Yes, and the Sun?"

''The Sun? Oh! It doesn't pass of a minimum sparkle in the universe" answers the man of the white guard-powder, showing one of those pictures where the stars appear as flour in the dark bottom. "The Sun? Look for your Sun here! You won't find him ever.

Frightened, we look. Rarely did we feel as lost as at this time: as the children in time of storm, we want to pull the cover over our heads and to hide inside of ourselves, without seeing anything of these numbers, pictures, bills and formulas dry and ugly and that - which horror! - They are right! Closing the eyes, we remember the time when the room of visits was the world, the Christmas tree was the own splendor, and we galloped in a broomstick, happy in our fantasy. But, "after all, we fell asleep...

When we woke up, the Sun is already going high in the sky. How beautiful is the world!

There it is the Earth, splendorous, with their secrets and mysteries.

In the field, among multicolored flowers, soar the butterflies. In the forest there sing birds of "beyond the imagination." At the end of the forest, here is the deer that, after granting a glance to the world, sinks in the jungle. In the mountain, the snow blinds and, in the caves, the gnomes' treasures shine. At the bottom of the sea, the octopus and the shark they engage death fight. The fish of fairy story shine in their apparel, as if they were ready to go to some dance.

Here is the earth! Will she be one anything? Will it be that she is a nullity?

No! In no place there is more beautiful stone than the diamond. In no place the clouds walk in the sky, without direction, playing with the wind.

The Earth can be one anything in the Universe. But it is the whole UNIVERSE in the anything.

Look at the sky today at night. And neither thinks, without feeling yourself or a little decreased, in the thousand million of galaxies that fly in the black space, up there.

And think, also, that, here, in the Earth, there is something that is, without a doubt, as big as the Universe: the man, which can become in the Universe.

Yes, the man is a singular creature. All of the vertebrates are endowed with brain, but the one of the man doesn't suffer confrontation. The moral world is a thing specifically human. We cannot admit that the lamentable howl of the monkey to the dead son's view, be at least the beginning of the magnitude of the pain": Oh! Look! There cry the gods, there cry all of the goddesses, because the beautiful pass off..." Although the doublet can sing a scale, it doesn't exist in him anything, absolutely anything of the germ of a future "Ninth Symphony" or "The Four Stations." The bird in love offers to the lover a colored feather, but it would never dawn in her the idea of symbolizing the "Thinker" or the "Mercy." We are entitled of pointing the "Decalogue", the "Sermon of the Mountain", and the "Declaration of the Human Rights" as honorable certificates of the human thought and art.

But, oh of us! - The human nature is not only greatness. There is in her obscure animalistic sensations.

Oh! What a caricature!

The old Greek symbolized the man with their two natures by the centaur - on top, hero, below, mount; and the woman for the mermaid, with lips that sing, but hands with vulture claws.

But, after all, what is the man?

No other being raises the eyes for the sky and says, from himself to himself: "Two things fill my soul of admiration and reverence, so much larger when more and more the reflection concentrates in them: the starry sky above me and the moral law inside of me." No other being terrestrial enquires about the past and proposes to the future the eternal questions: "From where?", "To where?", "What for?", "Why?" No known creature knows how to calculate the tiny atoms and the immense distances of the Universe. He is the priest, for whom the world is a grandiose temple and where the sacrifice is the cult of the enigma more and more revealed, but more and more obscure, by which, in which and for which he was created: the Nature.