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Without Fear Nor Hope - 2015

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The motto “without hope or fear” –nec spe nec metu – has been adopted, since antiquity, by those who, despising both the promises and the threats regarding some hypothetical future life, know that living the present in all its fullness constitutes the highest and most profound end of life itself.

Such is the disposition that manifests itself in the poetic topos of thecarpe diem, that is, “reap the present day!”, which can be found, from antiquity to today, in some of the greatest poems ever written. Thus, for example, Paulo Mendes Campos says in the first stanza of his beautiful sonnet Tempo-eternidade:

The moment is everything to me who, absent
of the secret that the days chain together,
I sink into the song that shepherds
the infinite clouds of the present.

Among other things, this is what delights us in the songs sung by Arthur Nogueira: the invitation for us to live like this, without fear or hope, but with the courage and excitement of immersing ourselves in the moment, in the days, in the songs and in the infinite clouds. of the present.

Anthony Cicero
2015