PAPER

I crossed a sea of ​​fire to get here. The song said...

Do you remember your life before this? He asked me. Yes, I said. I remember.

I well remember the discomfort, the feeling of not belonging to this world and thinking that they put me here by mistake. I remember the constant pain. It was painful to exist. It was painful to smile. Yes, I remember all the times I felt a part of my soul crumble, little by little until I thought there would be nothing left of me. But between one numbness and another, between one distraction and another, I kept going on my way, until I had something better to remember besides sadness. At some point, that mass of bad feelings that gave a strange meaning to what I was, became just a brief description of what I no longer am. But no, I never forgot how it all started and I still cry every time I stop to think about what I went through to get here.

My first philosophy class was an interview with Caetano Veloso, where he said: What we carry from this life is the life we ​​carry.

I remember a lot of people making fun of this phrase, but this is one of the best lessons I have ever learned in my life, and it has become a kind of mantra for me.

Don't erase the ideas I have, don't let forgetfulness take over me.

I discovered that the worst evil that exists is memory loss. If you lose an eye, you can still see, if you lose a lung, you can still breathe, but if you lose part of your memory, a part of you ceases to exist right here in this world, while you are still in it. Always make an effort to remember. From the silliest, craziest things you believed in your youth, to the worst evils that have ever happened to you. Don't allow yourself to forget. There is a huge difference between repressing and forgetting. I'm not telling you to spend every day remembering that moment when you lost the one who could have been the "love of your life." Some things don't deserve to be remembered, some emotions don't deserve to be felt more than once, but they were necessary for you to become who you are today. Keep living, writing and turning the pages of life, but once in a while, flip through everything. Stop and see the marks left in that book of yours.

Listen to what your heart has to say about everything you've been through. Some lessons only appear when we do this, and some traumas lose their greatness when we realize that they fit into a few chapters, but that the whole story is much bigger. Value this, value your story, no matter how sad and uncomfortable it may be. Your path is the treasure that you take from this life when you die, that's what Caetano was saying. What we carry from this life is the life we ​​carry, the dreams we achieve, the battles we fight, the pain, the tragedy, but also the love and the enchantment. The beauty that only our eyes are capable of seeing, the sensations that only our bodies can record. That's what we take with us.

Like some Buddhists, I believe that when we die, we evaporate and return to the great web or ocean that connects everything. We dissipate into particles of memories and emotions, and these particles and emotions are what continue to follow us in our existence. They are the greatest proof that we were here. Everything we felt, everything we lived.

That's why I prefer to write on paper instead of just writing on the computer. Even if the keys on the typewriter are harder, or my handwriting is ugly in pen. I want to record what I feel, what I see. Understanding the world has always seemed to me to be something physical, scientific, even. I believe in what I learn, and my learning has never come in the form of a download. Now imagine, money, the thing that humans are most capable of valuing, has become something completely virtual. There is no room with Elon Musk's billion-dollar treasure and a dragon guarding it all. It's just data in a cloud. We must always remember this, all it takes is for someone smarter to be born who is capable of erasing everything, all the data on the planet, and that's it, the revolution has begun.

Fingers stained with ink, the smell of gear oil, the sound of the keys or even the scribbles hurting the page. There is something very real about writing, about recording. Today I heard a blogger saying that the unitedstatian president has withdrawn funding from all libraries and wants to revise the books. No, I am not transcribing a paragraph from George Orwell. Everything we post on the internet belongs to it, and now it also belongs to artificial intelligence. Whether we like it or not, everything we write, photograph, film, and say can be modified by this entity that is capable of creating the perception of a world that is completely identical to ours and yet completely nonexistent, falls,e and deceitful. My question is: What will prove real life?

The originals of everything that happened, was lived, felt, and breathed are in the memory, and when we die, it will all be there, okay in the meantime, we need more records here before everything becomes a big collective lie, and we have difficulty remembering things. There is no ginko-biloba that can account for our memories rotted by the internet. We need more paper because the web of the universe cannot be falsified, but the web of social networks can.

Bookstores cannot close, and analog cameras cannot die. Artists who draw for real are actually recording the world and not creating an imperfect copy. Plato was wrong; he thought this world was an imperfect copy. Imagine what he would say if he saw the AI's drawings. We don't make copies, we are not copies, we are records.

What I experienced, I felt physically, you know. I feel like I can hold what I learned, what I carry with me, don't you feel it? A weight of life?

Well then, I treat it like a prize. I hold it up and give a speech of thanks for a moment. Then I continue writing on paper...