Universo sem sentimento

Perder o marido, ficando viúva com dois filhos, é uma experiência trágica com claros efeitos pós-traumáticos, mas usando a abordagem que a autora tanto gosta, a estatística, não é uma experiência nada incomum, nem agora, nem em toda a história da nossa espécie. Por outro lado, ser-se uma cientista de topo, premiada com uma bolsa MacArthur, a chamada "Bolsa dos Génios" no domínio da busca de inteligência fora da Terra, ou surgindo na capa da New York Times Magazine, com o título: "A Mulher Que Pode Encontrar-nos Outra Terra", é algo muito pouco comum, reservado a um número muito restrito de pessoas. Neste sentido, juntar as duas coisas poderia ter funcionado, poderia ter sido um memoir distinto. O problema acontece quando de frente batem e chocam espetacularmente a emocionalidade e as relações humanas de uma família com a racionalidade e abstração do mundo das ciências exatas. Ou seja, Sara Seager é uma cientista brilhante e com certeza teria sido muito interessante ouvi-la falar do seu trabalho e das complexidades da sua ciência, mas ouvi-la expor enormes incongruências de ser esposa e mãe, não tendo sequer noção destas é doloroso. Se no final nos diz que descobriu, apenas quase aos 50, que  era autista, a verdade é que não usou o livro, em parte alguma, para apresentar qualquer visão crítica das peculiaridades do seu comportamento. O seu discurso auto-centrado manteve-se igual, Seager é exatamente a mesma pessoa no final e no início do livro, nada mudou, e nesse sentido pergunta-se qual o interesse de um livro que não tem nada para dizer. Deixo alguns excerto de suporte a esta minha crítica:

Sobre a decisão de namorar com a pessoa que viria a ser o seu marido, e pai dos seus filhos:

“I had felt a tiny spark with Mike, but nothing like the lightning strikes you see in movies. Was a tiny spark a good enough reason to let him in? I didn’t think so. Besides, I’d be leaving Toronto at the end of the summer. Harvard’s Department of Astronomy had accepted me into its graduate program the day we’d gone skiing at Killarney. There was no point in starting something that would end before it had a chance to begin.”

E a diferença para uma decisão, pouco depois, para aceitar uma oferta de Princeton:

“The next day, John gave me a ride to the train station. I had no sooner slipped into the car and shut the door when he turned to me. “Sara,” he said, “I’d like to offer you a job here.” I looked out the window for less than a trillionth of a second. I turned back to him with the widest smile. “I’m so pleased to accept,” I said.”

A sua competitividade e demanda do marido:

“Another team used radial velocity to confirm the finding, winning the accolades that come with being first. I spent two days crying (...) He [o marido] didn’t understand why being first in such an esoteric way mattered. His inability to understand my sadness was maddening”

Sobre a decisão de ter filhos, contra a vontade do seu marido:

"I wanted to have children -- Mike did not share the feeling -- Soon after Mike and I moved to Washington, I was pregnant. I was elated -- Two years after Max came Alex -- “I wanted to have more kids -- I tried not to feel wounded when Mike wanted to race off for the fastest post-baby vasectomy in reproductive history.”

Quem tomava conta da vida familiar:

“Mike and I had finished building our own solar system, with its own discrete centers of gravity: two boys and three cats living in a pretty yellow house. He would continue to work from home, surrounded by his marked-up books. He also took over nearly all of the practical duties that go into running a family. I was never good at those things, and practice hadn’t made me any better. I still struggled to pump gas into the car; basic household chores mystified me. Mike agreed, in action if not by marital contract, to take care of everything ordinary so that I could focus on the extraordinary. ”

Como geria o seu trabalho:

“My job was a magnet, one end or the other, the push or the pull. I found my sixty hours of work each week—maybe forty at MIT, and another twenty at home—”

Depois da morte do marido, percebeu o problema de não ter ninguém para tomar conta dos filhos, ou de si, mas o MIT cuidou dela, aumentando o seu ordenado para que pudesse pagar a uma governanta full-time:

"“Sara?” Marc said. “How much do you need?” Marc gave me enough. I’m not sure how he managed it, but he found the money for me to pay for more help. From then on, there would almost always be someone in my house—the company that I was paying to keep, and that in return kept me.”

A cereja chegaria depois, quando se envolveu num projeto de 18 meses, que requeria reuniões trimestrais noutro estado, a sua reação foi dizer que  não se levava em conta a vida de quem tinha filhos, como se até aquele momento alguma vez tivesse considerado tal, ou se tivesse importado com isso para com os seus colegas, indo a ponto de dizer que não só amava os filhos, mas também gostava deles!!!

“If the people who had written that proposal had walked through my door at that moment, they would have witnessed the hottest of meltdowns. I would have scolded them for the cold, universal presumptions they made about how the rest of us might live and work. My children didn’t have two parents or any other extended family nearby. They had me, and I had them. I had always loved them; now I liked them, too.”

Por fim, resolveu iniciar uma carreira de ataque à discriminação das mulheres!

“I told the organizers of the Probe-class studies that their call for applicants, however accidentally, was discriminatory -- I was still upset, and I needed to vent some more. I had long stopped hearing the internal whisper that reminds us to be polite. I had been asked by the Huffington Post to write regularly about women and science -- I began by writing about the explosion in our understanding of the universe -- Thanks to Kepler, we had determined -- that seventeen billion Earth-size planets orbited their own suns in the Milky Way alone. Think about that. Seventeen billion. But most of them had been found by men. Why was only half our species doing nearly all of the job?”

Olhando para as listas de novos memoirs no GoodReads, sinto que posso estar a ser injusto para com Sara Seager, pois provavelmente, apesar de todos estes problemas, o seu memoir será com certeza mais interessante do que os memoirs de Emily Ratajkowski, Gary Neville, Stanley Tucci, Hunter Biden ou Will Smith.