I often feel the need to browse through a book immediately after having finished it, as if something went amiss. I do as I did when preparing for an exam in my school years: I reread out loud, underline and write down what might be important in a notebook. As far as reading is concerned, I am always late, don’t mind rereading and never follow the trends. Each book has its own time and more than one way of being interpreted and although I try to engage with books that I think I should have read, this rarely works.

The oeuvre of Jorge Queiroz is the one book that I read constantly: an artistic work that is faithful to itself; a description of aesthetic pleasure. Perhaps the ideal lovers of his works ought to suffer from insomnia and have the time to view and review the same work for hours until exhaustion overcomes them.Or perhaps they should be ready to be taken into the mysteries of the soul; or perhaps they require that sublime ease that comes from being conversant with works of painting from more than an epoch (from medieval painting to the Italian Renaissance, from Bosch to Artemisia Gentileschi, Velázquez, Goya). The oeuvre of Jorge Queiroz is steeped in the conviction that what is loved endures, and that the quest for light is in equal parts narration and portent.

Between those who pause and those who quickly move on, there are also those who reflect on how to recall and think about the visual apocalypse of such richly stratified work, which rewards the time spent before it.

Green paws, unassuming and clawed, a solitary wing in a corner, optical tunnels and a billy goat-denture. Rodents in their burrows and a hot bath in the moonlight…Wait, there is magma below the surface of which world?

My friend Isocrates says that there is no difference between body and mind and that by exercising the body I am allowing the mind to train and vice-versa. When you educate yourself in thought, he says, you are transforming your body and by training it, new pathways open up for the mind.

Archimedes was charged with establishing whether the gold entrusted by King Hiero to a goldsmith had in fact been used for the manufacture of a votive crown or, as the king suspected, silver had also been employed. Archimedes sat in his tub, which was filled to the brim, and noticed that the amount of water that overflowed took up the same space as the body that went into it. To discover the misdeed, he merely had to determine the weight and volume of the crown and then compare them with an amount of pure gold of equal weight. Ingenio at the service of inventio.

The mystical fable, the near future of words, the intermittent oscillation of dreams, a question mark surrounded by desolation and fire.

I take on the subject without going white or anxious. The entire Universe is crisscrossed by vital forces that may potentially, albeit not always successfully, be recognised and harnessed. Led by Pliny the Elder, the ancients saw the moon as a funnel that caused those energies to converge on planet Earth.

In the Odyssey, Homer tells of Ulysses’ return to Ithaca, where Penelope has awaited him for over a decade without ever losing hope. Ulysses undergoes all sorts of travails but ends up returning home. Many centuries later, Constanine Cavafi looks at Ulysses’ journey back home from a totally opposite angle, breathing life into a marvellous quest for happiness that sees Ulysses actually enjoying the journey and experiencing everything he is supposed to experience. Ithaca will always be the goal, but what’s the hurry?

On the Infinite Universe and Worlds (1584) by Giordano Bruno:

To stop reading and to look at words only as images.

I do not know where I am going with this, but I have been reading a very interesting text by Ilya Kabakov about the ‘total installation’, and this notion of poetry, geometry and movement led me to another notion that he develops at length, having to do with building installations that focus more on the analysis of spaces, intervals and distances between things than on the objects themselves. Perhaps soon I will have a question, which remains as yet unformulated, and the best is to give it time. Onwards and upwards!

In the first person, always. Misunderstandings will continue to feed us vita natural durante and sparse trustworthy information about your family background and youth… I feel relieved.