O túmulo inquieto (livro)

O túmulo inquieto é uma obra literária de Cyril Connolly, escrita em 1944, sob o pseudônimo de palinuro. Compreende uma coleção de aforismos, citações, reflexões nostálgicas e explorações mentais.

Palinurus foi o piloto do navio de Aeneas no Aeneid de Virgílio, que caiu ao mar como um ato de expiação para os deuses irritados e cujo espírito vagava no submundo. Connolly usa o tema para explorar seus sentimentos e revisar sua situação enquanto se aproxima da idade de quarenta apresenta uma conta muito pessimista e autodepreciativa. Nisso, ele traz citações de alguns de seus autores favoritos: Pascal, De Quincey, Chamfort e Flaubert, além de arrebatados do Buda, Filosofia Chinesa e Freud.

O título do livro é retirado de uma música folclórica inglesa com o mesmo nome:

The twelvemonth and a day being up,The dead began to speak:'Oh who sits weeping on my grave,And will not let me sleep?'

O livro está em quatro partes intitulado Ecce Gubernator ("Aqui está o piloto"), Te Palinure Pequens ("Procurando você, Palinurus") e La Clé des Chants ("The Key of Songs") e quem era palinuro. Os dois primeiros contêm conjuntos semelhantes de reflexão, enquanto o terceiro contém mais lembranças com referências veladas à vida de Connolly na França. O último faz um relato da história de Palinurus.

Citações

'"The more books we read, the sooner we perceive that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.""There is no pain in life equal to that which two lovers can inflict on each other"."When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest actions, but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized.""A lazy person, whatever the talents with which he starts forth, will have condemned himself to second-hand thoughts, and to second-rate friends.""Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.""'Dry again?' said the Crab to the Rock-Pool. 'So would you be,' replied the Rock-Pool, 'if you had to satisfy, twice a day, the insatiable sea.""Morning tears return; spirits at their lowest ebb. Approaching forty, sense of total failure; not a writer but a ham actor whose performance is clotted with egotism; dust and ashes; 'brilliant'. - that is not worth doing. Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style,—which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity.""Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learnt to walk.""No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.""Everything is a dangerous drug to me except reality, which is unendurable.""Imprisoned in every fat man a thin one is wildly signalling to be let out.""The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.""The dread of loneliness is keener than the threat of bondage; and so we marry, again and again.""Those of us who were brought up as Christians and have lost our faith have retained the sense of sin without the saving belief in redemption. This poisons our thought and so paralyses us in action."