(James Cameron e Nathaniel Hawthorne?)

In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844), a prototypical nerd with few social graces and no head for business turns a watchmaker’s shop into an artist’s studio where, ultimately, he creates a clockwork butterfly in every way indistinguishable from a real butterfly except in its being even more beautiful. Although most of the story is about how misunderstood this nerdy clockmaker is, Hawthorne’s deeper concern is the fundamental mistake of supposing that the idea of artistic creation is not just to create something that is like reality but rather something that amounts to a new reality, a creation to rival God’s own. Indeed, as religion was already fading out of the Western cultural picture by the mid-nineteenth century, the story presents us with a foretaste of our own time in which, to an ever greater extent, we expect the artist to become God.

Na nossa natureza há, porém, uma provisão, a um tempo maravilhosa e boa, de que o que sofre não conheça nunca a intensidade do que sente pela sua tortura presente, mas principalmente pela dor que depois lhe fica. Com uma atitude quase serena, portanto, Hester Prynne atravessou esta parte do seu suplício, e chegou a uma espécie de cadafalso, na extremidade ocidental da praça do mercado.

Nathaniel Hawthorne, A Letra Vermelha, Fernando Pessoa (Trad.), Assírio e Alvim, 2002.