Granizada / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Hailstorm

I

– Reading is an act of servility.
– Good is the lesser evil.
– Life is a squandering.
– Life is an affront; the organism is a web of emunctories.
– To live is to die.
– God is cruel to the poor.
– God lacks practical existence.
– God is the relegated and lazy sovereign of a constitutional monarchy, where Satan serves as Prime Minister.
– Truth is the fact.
– Philosophy sets us up in case we insult it.
– Ignorance takes us straight to skepticism, which is the most judicious attitude of our mind.
– Science consists of facts and their explanation. The latter are variable and subject to error, but we shouldn’t worry, because the error is the principal agent of civilization.
– Reputations would impede progress if whisperers didn’t exist.
– The word outstanding applied to students: a tag for sheep, a jewel for the insignificant, noise of the anonymous.
– Law and art are an amendment of reality by man.
– Manners serve to camouflage poor breeding. Urbanity consists of a good mood.
– The cultivation of The Liberator.
– Aristocracy by birth is an autosuggestion. That is why no one believes in the lineage of anyone else.
– Democracy is the aristocracy of ability.
– Illustrious surnames give you free reign.
– Money is only good for buying.
– The bourgeoisie are characterized by the fear of appearing to be bourgeois.
– Schemers tend to display an ostentatious laboriousness.
– Work is a devoted exercise that serves the destitute when they try to win the kingdom of heaven.
– Grammar exists in order to justify illogical actions of language.
– Words are divided into expressive and inexpressive. There are no pure words.
– A language is the universe translated into that language.
– He who uses irreplaceable expressions is a good writer.
– Writers are divided into the boring and the amenable. The first are also called classics.
– People of a classical temperament elevate the case to an example and the example to a rule.
– The only decent thing to do with history is falsify it.
– History is only good for increasing hatred among men.
– We must throw out history, to use with it the gesture of the maid who, on any given morning, dispenses with a broom the corpse of a bat, black, dirty and gloomy critter.
– Conservatives are left-handed.
– Two doctors can’t face each other without laughing.
– It is possible to classify a people according to the interjections they use. The Romans were simpletons; they would animate each other with inexpressive interjections: io, eheu, papae.
– North Americans are alert inventors. They discovered that the purpose of clothing has as its object to dress man, rather than oppress or disguise him. The adoption of the loose neck is another victory of the republic against the ancien régime, a delightful lesson from Benjamin Franklin for the measured courtier of Versailles. That philanthropist wouldn’t rest in the service of his peers after inventing the lightning rod.
– Concubinage deserves the best from the republic. It has accelerated the fusion of the Venezuelan races.
– In Venezuela there isn’t and can’t exist a conflict between the races, because the people of color aspire to be white.
– The family is a school of anthropophagous selfishness.
– Marriage is a zoological state.
– Marriage is the easiest path by which two people are able to hate and scorn each other.
– Marriage: whips and galleys.
– Falling in love is a lack of love for oneself.
– A man marries when he has nothing else to think about.
– Husband and wife: accomplices!
– Humanity is a string of monkeys.
– Men are divided into mental and seminal.
– Women are divided into beautiful and ugly.
– Women are war booty.
– Gideon takes on the task of seducing the woman he marries.
– Gideon loves his wife.
– Clerics abominate woman, agent of heretical nature.
– Ladies are the bailiffs of the dogmatic and chubby bourgeoisie.
– All males should ignore and curse literature. Reading it is a dissipation worthy, at most, of the harem’s deceitful odalisques and perverse eunuchs.
– Dostoevsky preached the religion of suffering. Beware of listening to that anomalous Russian! Let us establish, finally, the religion of human dignity, an intelligible and cheap religion, without clerics or altar.
– Candid people understand that a woman’s love can constitute the prize for a heroic effort or a meritorious life. They don’t notice that an adventurer or an insignificant man would attain the love of that same woman.
– Adultery is a forced crime like contraband. It serves to resolve the tyrannical situations born of the marriage of convenience. It reestablishes sincerity in election.
– Friendship is a capitulation of dignity.
– Lack of scruples is a substitute for energy.
– Fortitude is desperation accepted.
– Language does not allow synonyms, because it is individuating like art. Two words, equivalents in the dictionary, cannot be used one for the other in discourse.
– The British Isles suffer the plague of the snob. Its men of letters have invented, to fight it, a special manner of feeling and expressing themselves, named humour.
– Feminism is a pretense of women to justify what is spent on their rearing.
– It is superfluous to speak ill of people.
– Aristocracy does not exist among the human species.
– Hospitality is a virtue of a barbarous people.
– Men must pay for the privilege of having been born males.
– The proud man compares himself with the ideal of perfection and the vain man compares himself with other men.
– Praise satisfies only abject beings. It is the equivalent of a grace or a license. When we accept it, we confess to the sovereignty of others.
– The word cosmetic summarizes the life and work of Oscar Wilde.
– Woman is the mother of the nation.
– Women are in charge in society’s parties. They invented them when they realized that the male refrains from mistreating them in public. The invention is relatively modern. The ancients did not know such mediocre functions.
– Evil is an author of beauty. Tragedy, the memory of misfortune, is the superior art. Evil introduces surprise, innovation in this routine world. Without evil, we would reach uniformity, we would succumb to idiocy.
– Frivolity is an element of literary beauty. Everything that teaches is ugly.
– The aristocrat needs distinction. The ugliness of the race disturbs in a practical manner the flowering of an aristocracy in Venezuela.
– Certain charity, that of the proud man, is simultaneous with envy. A person curses the prosperity of his equal, censors, at the very least, his fellow in the same line and embraces and gives to the humble man.
– Time is an invention of watchmakers.
– Horace is a golden mediocrity.
– Glory is not aristocratic. It is the verdict of humanity, the agreement of a bunch of parrots.
– Virtue is the sacrifice of oneself. It differs essentially from austerity and from its accomplice ugliness.
– One thing Hamlet forgot: maybe it is necessary to practice evil in order to be respected, to live amidst our fellow beings.
– The English automaton, inveterate imitator, professor of mediocre elegance, formal puppet, supplies the human species with mimicry. Correction is his hypocritical ideal.
– A tongue lacks its own existence. Next to abstract language, general and impersonal, gathered in its straggling lexicons, exists the very singular language of each artist of the word and the language agreed upon by each guild of professors or officials.
– It is very easy to discover defects because every quality is necessarily a characteristic trait, that is, a limit.
– Cowardice, boldness against the destitute, is the essential trait of the human creature.
– Man has invented the symbol because he can’t grasp reality directly.
– God is the primordial law of the Universe. He is, consequently, inflexible.
– Explanation should embrace the phenomenon. A man of judgment gives sparingly to the general rule and proscribes latitudinal, loose causes, capable of explaining too much. Sociology is the monotonous art of negating voluntary progress, citing shapeless causes, of conjectural and equivocal effect.
– Sociology is the Eiffel Tower of stupidity.
– Sacrifice rescues the opprobrium of life.


II

– Uncertainty is the law of the Universe.
– Literature always deserves praise. At the very least it is a derivative; the subject that practices it could always bother us with a more deplorable activity.
– One can conceive of a naturalist morality, founded in the instinct of conservation. This is not a case of an instinct of feral conservation, but rather an instinct of human conservation, converted to the cult of self dignity and to respect for that of the other.
– Shyness has a good tone.
– Society takes advantage of great men less than what it loses with the calamity of their descendants.
– Sociology is a chapter of psychology, because rational beings determine themselves by virtue of reasons.


III

– Groom of German origin, insipid and hypnotic.


IV

– Fame is nothing but the vote of the crowd.


V

– Democracy in the State and aristocracy in the family.
– The greatness of false and influential heroes rises with the whole of others’ merits.
– Agreed upon and orthodox history, catechism of urbanity and correct manners, is cruel to the original and the schismatic, and squanders its palms on the ordinary.


VI

– Freedom is nothing but the fulfillment of the law dictated in favor of the general interest.




I. –Elite; Caracas, 7 September 1929. II. –Elite; Caracas, 10 October 1925. III. –Elite; Caracas, 5 January 1929. (Published under the title Cencerro [Cowbell].) IV. –Elite; Caracas, 24 December 1927. (Published under the title Resumen [Summary].) V. –Elite; Caracas, 7 July 1928. (Published under the title Argumentos [Arguments].) VI. –La Universidad; Caracas, September 1927.




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }