"The library should be equivalent to the laboratory as the center of the university, both forming its double heart"
(Antonio Candido, during the inauguration of the Unicamp Central Library, in 1989)

Atypical interview

Antonio Candido

The reporter asks some questions that I will answer in part, dissolving them into a type of information based on his questions. - What impression I keep of my parents surrounded by their library, is what you want to know first of all. I answer that I was born and raised in houses full of books, not just those on medicine, my father's profession, but on literature, history, philosophy. We lived in cities in the interior of Minas Gerais, and when I remember the past the impression I have is of a kind of environment very different from the environment, an environment that my parents created with a broader cultural density than the places where we lived. Books were a kind of symbol of the cultural quality that they valued, regardless of where they were.

My father and mother constantly told us about their reading, painting, music, their experience in the big cities where they had been. My father used to read and explain to us every night, after dinner, certain texts in Portuguese or French that he thought were appropriate. I remember, for example, that when I was around 13 or 14 years old, we read a lot of Os Sertões, the first edition of which I owned, bought at Casa Genoud, in Campinas. He was in the 4th year of high school when the big news came. My brothers and I were raised in an environment saturated with culture where books had a privileged place, encouraged by parents who valued knowledge as their main asset.

Luckily for me, in 1930 we went to live in Poços de Caldas, a very popular spa resort that had, somewhat by miracle, an excellent bookstore, with French and English books as well as national ones. I became a regular customer and my father liberally paid the heavy bills for the books I was buying.

It is clear that at that time and in that world the book was the main and almost only means of acquiring knowledge. There was no TV, there was no internet and radio began to spread precariously after 1930. The reporter's concern is legitimate, asking whether the culture based on books is not more favorable to deepening reflection. Current resources, which overwhelmingly attract young people, require less individual initiative, because the bulk of the information is imposed, so to speak, while in the book universe there is greater scope for each person to choose. I wouldn't know how to decide, but I am incapable of conceiving the acquisition of knowledge outside the book. In any case, we must not close ourselves off in the face of new means of information, which can generate a different and equally valid type of culture. Before falling into pessimism, it is important not to forget that there have been great cultures that were less dependent on writing, such as the Greek culture, the basis of ours. Henri-Irenée Marrou, who I always quote in this case, discussing in the 1950s the advent of TV and the extension of radio, remembered that Plato and Aristotle did not write books, they spoke, just as poets sang their poems. It was a splendid oral culture; the recording of speeches came later and was restricted.

In addition to these general questions, linked to the fate of the book, the reporter is concerned with other equally important ones, such as asking whether the excessive specialization of our time is not equivalent to a fragmentation of intellectual knowledge, making comprehensive views of a more critical nature difficult. By the way, I remember that my father's generation, born before the Republic, was already different from mine in this aspect, but not in an essential way. I'm closer to him than to today's young people. At that time, medicine was still not very scientific and had a lot of craftsmanship (so to speak), so that its professionals were led to speculate about broader problems, looking for answers in the so-called humanities. My father was very cultured, and I met colleagues of his who were as much or more than him, because there was time to acquire knowledge beyond specific ones. Today, a doctor needs to dedicate himself entirely to the acquisition of technical knowledge that is increasingly more sectorized, which changes constantly, so that the type of humanist doctor has ended. Was it an advantage? Was it a disadvantage? I believe that for the cure of the sick it was enormous progress. But I confess that I am incapable of theoretically solving this problem, which translates into the dialectic of specialization and generalization.

The reporter ends by asking about the composition of the collection that my brothers and I donated to Unicamp in 1989 named after our father, Aristides Candido de Mello e Souza (1885-1942), also asking about the reasons that led us to do so.

There are 3.500 volumes, of which the absolute majority are my books. The rest consists of books that belonged to my father, my mother and my brothers, but in a much smaller proportion. I clarify that my father's medical library was donated by my mother in 1960 to the Faculty of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto. Also: part of my mother's books was donated to the Faculty of Philosophy of Poços de Caldas, the city where she was born, where my father was director of Thermal Services and later a clinical doctor. Finally: there are still hundreds of their books that are with me and one of my brothers. The donation was made in my father's name in order to prolong his memory. The choice of Campinas is due not only to my connection with Unicamp, but due to the city's role in the education of my father, who completed most of his secondary education there, three years from 1901 to 1903, in the famous Cult of Science. Coming from a small town in Minas Gerais, Campinas was a great experience for him in terms of culture and sociability. That's why he was always attached to her and would certainly like to know that his name is linked to Unicamp.

As for the reasons: I did all my studies, secondary, complementary and higher education in public schools and today I live retired from one of them, where I was a teacher. Now, all of them were or are supported by the people, so donating books to institutions is a way of repaying, however little, what I owe to the people of my country. I believe we have already donated around twelve thousand volumes: to the Library of the Faculty of Medicine at USP in Ribeirão Preto, as I said; to the Central Library of the Faculty of Philosophy at USP-São Paulo, at Unicamp, at the Faculty of Philosophy of Araraquara (Unesp), at PUC in Rio de Janeiro (where I taught a postgraduate course), at the Faculty of Philosophy of Poços de Caldas, today incorporated into the PUC of Minas Gerais, into the Cultural Center of our city of Cássia, in the Southwest of Minas. And I will continue donating.

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