Adolfo Casais Monteiro

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Abstract
I walk among rows of words, easy and difficult ones, staring at each one. They do not answer me. Today they do not answer. I suppose they are far from me, I can not see nothing in common between them and what I would like to say. The idea of modernity does not please them, or maybe I am being too particular about it. Both of us are right, I believe. What is the point of questioning an idea, opening our way to it among rows of words? But I wonder if this is not the path that can lead me to the dark cave? Of course, it is an attribute of modernity that words and men do not understand one another. Maybe the beginning of modernity is precisely there. Isn’t it? Didn’t poetry wish to change itself into music by taking all the potential accords from words, all their possible harmonies? And was it not in this wish of becoming music that they began loosing their outlines, they turned into magic, stone, cry and they became at last the great instrument of men’s disbelief on truth, on reality, on any kind of security?

Modernity became a myth just like any other. Modernity is over. It is no longer the “Great Pan is dead” to which one can listen, coming from the bottom of the forests. Now among the sound of skyscrapers, one can hear: “modernity is dead”. We need a new name, because some other thing is born. If it isn’t born, it needs to be, because the man of modernity is dead and while there is no name for the new age, how can it possibly be born? Modernity died with the discovery of the atom bomb. Modernity is not apocalyptical enough, and there is no room in it for the strength and determination that can make man stronger than the atom bomb.