Gentileza

In 1961, a big fire destroyed an American circus in Rio de Janeiro. Lots of people died (more than 500, mostly children). It was considered to be one of the most tragic accidents that happened in the world of circus. A few days later, on Christmas Eve, a 44 years old man arrived in the place where the accident took place in one of his many trucks. He claimed he heard voices in that very morning telling him to abandon everything he had and to dedicate himself to a more spiritual world. So he decided to base himself in that site to console the parents of the victims, giving them wine and other goods. He lived in that place for almost four years, disseminating kindness and love, never asking for anything in return. His name was Jose Datrino, but people started to call him Jose of Kindness.

After leaving that place, known as Kindness Paradise after Jose Datrino, he started to walk around the streets of Rio as a prophet. He was an old man, with the appearance of a biblical prophet, a long white beard, a long tunic, and Franciscan-style sandals. He carried in his hands two tablets of written prophecies, like those of Moses. He approached people who passed in cars and on sidewalks, but he didn’t ask for anything, and instead offered them words of love, flowers, and compassion during more than three decades throughout the streets of Rio de Janeiro.

Jose Datrino became known as Profeta Gentileza (Prophet of Kindness), then, and part of his preaching consisted in writing his message on the pillars of a big viaduct in Rio. That way, in the middle of the confusion, indifference, selfishness, and violence of the big city, all passersby could read in that giant urban display, sentences such as: KINDNESS GENERATES KINDNESS, DON’T USE PROBLEMS, DON’T USE POVERTY, USE LOVE, or even KINDNESS IS THE MEDICINE FOR ALL DISEASES.

Since 1996, after Prophet Gentileza’s death, his murals became orphans, without any kind of care. The murals deteriorated a lot and ended up covered with a layer of gray paint, by the Rio de Janeiro Urban Cleaning Company. The song Gentileza (Kindness), by Marisa Monte, contained in her 2000 album Memories, Chronicles and Declarations of Love is about this unfortunate episode:

They have erased it all
They have painted everything gray
The word on the wall
Is covered with paint
They have erased it all
They have painted everything gray
On the wall there is only
Sadness and fresh paint
Through the streets of the city
We deserve to read the letters
And the words of Gentileza
For this I ask
You in the world
Which is more intelligent
The book or the knowledge?
The world is a school
Life is a circus
Love is the word that liberates
So spoke the prophet

Gentileza was proud of his writings, as the pictures suggest. Why wouldn't he be? From a grammatical and philosophical or literary viewpoint, his writings may not have stood as a significant contribution. But what is more intelligent: the book or the knowledge?

The criticism to modernity is not a monopoly of the masters of academic thinking, like Freud with his Civilization and Its Discontents, or Horkheimer with his Eclipse of Reason, or Habermas with his Knowledge and Human Interests or even with the philosophical production of a later Heidegger. Prophet Gentileza, representing the popular and cordial thinking, arrived to the same conclusions of those masters. He was even more direct than them as he proposed an alternative: kindness as the irradiation of care and essential tenderness. This paradigm has more chances to humanise us than that that burned with the circus in Rio: the spirit of geometry, the knowledge as power e the power as domination over people and nature.

The subject of kindness offers us a way of awakening from the attitudes of indifference that surround us. Gentileza used to preach fraternal love and urged people to devote their attentions to others and create intimacy with each other.