MACHADO DE ASSIS
<font color=orange face="Tahoma"><b>Machado de Assis is to Brazil what Shakespeare is to England, and should his texts be written in a more "popular" language, such as english or french, he'd be amongst the first five names of literature in the world.
Ladies and Gentleman, I now present you "The Delirium", chapter #7 of the book "Posthume Memoirs of Bras Cubas", by Machado de Assis, brazilian writer. (my favourite, but then again I guess you've figured it out). The book is a biography of Bras Cubas told by Bras Cubas himself, starting backwards - first his death, then the delirium mortis, then the sickness, his late years, early years, childhood, birth. It's an unique book that can be acquired in any language. It's actually a critique to the values of positivism, naturalism, scientificism and the controversial embracing of the french revolution ideals of freedom, equalty and fraternity by the brazilian society of the late years of the XIX century, still based on slavery.
No more yadda yadda now, enjoy your reading.
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<p>The Delirium
So far as I know, no one has yet related his own delirium. I shall do it, and science will be grateful to me. If the reader has no taste for the contemplation of psychological phenomena, he may skip the chapter; let him go straight to the story part of the book. But, however lacking he may be in curiosity, I should like him to know that what occurred in my head during this period of twenty or thirty minutes is extremely interesting.
First, I took the form of a Chinese barber, rotund and skilful, shaving a mandarin, who paid me for my work with candy and pinches — mandarin whimsicality.
Soon after, I felt myself being transformed into St. Thomas’ Summa Theologica, printed in one volume and bound in morocco with engravings and a silver lock — an idea that gave my body the most rigid immobility; and I still remember that, as my hands were the two overlapping parts that locked, I crossed them on my chest, and someone (Virgilia, doubtless) uncrossed them because they gave me the appearance of a corpse.
Finally, back in human form, I saw a hippopotamus approach. He carried me off. I remained silent and did not resist, whether through fear or because of confidence in him I do not know; but, within a short time, we were proceeding at such a dizzy speed that I ventured to speak to him, and tactfully remarked that the trip seemed to me to have no preconceived destination.
"You are mistaken," replied the animal; "we are going to the beginning of the ages."
I insinuated that it must be very far off; but the hippopotamus did not hear me or did not understand me, unless he was merely feigning one or the other. As he apparently could talk, I asked him whether he was a descendant of Achilles’ horse or of Balaam’s ass, and he replied with a gesture common to quadrupeds of both species: he wiggled his ears. For my part, I closed my eyes, relaxed, and abandoned myself to fate. I am not ashamed to confess that I felt a certain itch of curiosity to know just where the beginning of the ages was, whether it was as mysterious as the origin of the Nile, and above all whether it was more important or less important than the end of the ages: reflections of a sick brain. As I kept my eyes closed, I did not see the road. I remember only that the feeling of cold continually increased in intensity, and that after a time it seemed to me that we were entering the region of eternal glaciers. I opened my eyes and saw that my animal was galloping across a plain white with snow, with snow mountains here and there, snow vegetation, and various big snow animals. Everything of snow; we were even frozen by a sun of snow. I tried to speak, but could only grunt anxiously, "Where are we?"
"We have gone beyond the Garden of Eden."
"I see. Let’s stop at the tent of Abraham."
"How can we if we are traveling towards the past!" derisively replied my mount.
I became annoyed and a little dizzy. The journey began to seem tiresome and absurd, the cold uncomfortable, the method of transportation violent, and the result uncertain. And afterwards — a sick man’s thoughts — even if we arrived at the stated destination, maybe the ages, irritated by the trespass upon their origin, would crush me between their nails, which must be as frightfully old as the ages themselves. While I was thinking about these things, we were eating up the road, and the plain was flying beneath our feet, until the animal suddenly stopped and I was able to look more calmly about me. To look only; I saw nothing but the immense whiteness of the snow, which by now had even invaded the sky. Perhaps I saw an occasional plant, enormous, brutish, its broad leaves swaying in the wind. The silence of this region was like that of the tomb: one might have said that the life in things had become stupefied in the presence of man.
Did it fall from the air? Did it rise from the earth? I do not know. I know only that an immense shape, the figure of a woman, then appeared before me, with its eyes, shining like the sun, fixed upon me. Everything about this figure had the vastness of the primeval; it was indeed all too much for human perception, for its contours were lost in the surroundings, and what appeared at first to be dense turned out, in many cases, to be diaphanous. Stupefied, I said nothing, I did not even cry out; but, after a short time, I asked who she was and what she was called — curiosity born of delirium.
"They call me Nature or Pandora. I am your mother and your enemy."
On hearing this last word, I drew back in fear. The figure loosed a fierce laugh, which produced about us the effects of a whirlwind; the plants were contorted, and a long wail broke the silence of the surroundings.
"Do not be afraid," she said, "my enmity does not kill; it is through life that it affirms itself. You are alive: I wish you no other calamity."
"Am I alive?" I asked, digging my nails into my hands as if to make certain.
"Yes, worm, you are alive. You have not yet lost that tattered cloak of which you are so proud; you will taste for a few hours more the bread of pain and the wine of misery. You are alive; even though you have gone mad, you are alive; and, if your consciousness regains a moment of lucidity, you will say that you want to live."
As she said this, the vision extended one of her arms and lifted me into the air as if I had been a feather. Then for the first time I could see her enormous face close up. Nothing more pacific in the world; no violent contortion; no suggestion of hate or ferocity. Its sole, all-pervasive expression was that of eternal isolation, of changeless will, of the impassivity of complete egoism. Wrath, if she experienced it, remained suppressed in her heart. At the same time, in this face with its glacial expression there was an air of youth, a combination of energy and freshness before which I felt like the weakest and most decrepit of beings.
"Do you understand me?" she said, after a period of mutual contemplation.
"No," I replied, "nor do I wish to understand you. You are an absurdity, a fable. I am surely dreaming, or, if in truth I have gone mad, you are nothing but a psychopath’s figment, a vain and empty thing, which reason, being absent, cannot govern. You, Nature? The Nature that I know is mother only and not enemy. She does not make of life a scourge nor does she wear such a face, indifferent as the tomb. And why Pandora?"
"Because I carry in my bag all good things and all evils, and the most remarkable of all, hope, man’s consolation. Are you trembling?"
"Yes. The way you look at me..."
"I know; for I am not only life, I am also death, and you are soon to give me back what I loaned you. Come, my great lecher, the voluptuousness of extinction awaits you."
When these words had reechoed like thunder in that vast emptiness, I thought that it would be the last sound ever to come to my ears; of a sudden I felt as if I were being decomposed. Then I looked at her with suppliant eyes and begged a few more years.
"A few years would seem like a minute!" she exclaimed. "Why do you want to live longer? To continue to devour and be devoured? Are you not sated with the show and the struggle? You have experienced again and again the least vile and least painful of my gifts: the brightness of morning, the gentle melancholy of dusk, the quietness of night, the face of the earth, and, last of all, sleep, my greatest gift to man. Poor idiot, what more do you wish?"
"Just to live, I ask nothing more. Was it not you who gave me life and placed in my heart the love of life? Then why should you do yourself injury by killing me?"
"Because I have no more need of you. Time finds interest not in the minute that is already passing, but only in the minute that is about to come. The new-born minute is strong, merry, thinks that it carries eternity in its bosom; it brings only death, and perishes like its predecessors. But I do not perish. Egoism, you say? Yes, egoism; I have no other law. Egoism, self-preservation. The tiger kills the lamb because the tiger’s philosophy is that, above all, it must live, and if the lamb is tender so much the better; this is the universal law. Come, see for yourself."
As she said this, she snatched me up and lifted me to the summit of a mountain. I looked down and, far off through a mist, contemplated for considerable time a curious thing. Just imagine, reader, a procession of all the ages, with all the human races, all the passions, the tumult of empires, the war of appetite against appetite and of hate against hate, the reciprocal destruction of human beings and their surroundings. This was the monstrous spectacle that I saw. The history of man and of the earth had thus an intensity that neither science nor the imagination could give it, for science is too slow and imagination too vague, whereas what I saw was the living condensation of history. To describe it one would have to make the lightning stand still. The ages moved along in a whirlwind, but nevertheless, because the eyes of delirium have a virtue of their own, I was able to distinguish everything that passed before me, afflictions and joys, glory and misery, and I saw love augmenting misery, and misery aggravating human debility. Along came voracious greed, fiery anger, drooling envy, and the hoe and the pen, both wet with sweat, and ambition, hunger, vanity, melancholy, affluence, love, and all of them were shaking man like a baby’s rattle until they transformed him into something not unlike an old rag. They were the several forms of a single malady, which would attack now the viscera, now the psyche, and would dance eternally, in its harlequin trappings, around the human species. Pain would give way to indifference, which was a dreamless sleep, or to pleasure, which was a bastard pain. Then man, whipped and rebellious, ran beyond the fatality of things in pursuit of a nebulous and elusive figure made of patches — a patch of the intangible, another of the improbable, another of the invisible — all loosely sewn together with the needle of imagination; and this figure, nothing less than the chimera of happiness, either eluded them or let them hang on to its skirt, and man would hug the skirt to his breast, and then the figure would laugh in mockery and would disappear.
Upon seeing such misfortune, I could not repress a cry of anguish, which Nature, or Pandora, heard with neither protest nor ridicule; and — I do not know by what psychological law of inversion — it was I who began to laugh, with a laughter immoderate and idiotic.
"You are right," I said, "the thing is amusing and worth seeing; a bit monotonous, perhaps, but worth seeing. When Job cursed the day he had been born, it was for want of seeing the show from up here. All right, Pandora, open your belly and devour me; the thing is amusing, but devour me."
Her reply was to force me to look down and to see the ages continuing to go by, fast and turbulent; generation upon generation, some sad like the Hebrews of the captivity, some merry like the libertines of Commodus’s reign, and all arriving punctually at the grave. I wanted to flee, but a mysterious force paralyzed my legs. Then I said to myself, "If the centuries are going by, mine will come too, and will pass, and after a time the last century of all will come, and then I shall understand." And I fixed my eyes on the ages that were coming and passing on; now I was calm and resolute, maybe even happy. Each age brought its share of light and shade, of apathy and struggle, of truth and error, and its parade of systems, of new ideas, of new illusions; in each of them the verdure of spring burst forth, grew yellow with age, and then, young once more, burst forth again. While life thus moved with the regularity of a calendar, history and civilization developed; and man, at first naked and unarmed, clothed and armed himself, built hut and palace, villages and hundred-gated Thebes, created science that scrutinizes and art that elevates, made himself an orator, a mechanic, a philosopher, ran all over the face of the globe, went down into the earth and up to the clouds, performing the mysterious work through which he satisfied the necessities of life and tried to forget his loneliness. My tired eyes finally saw the present age go by end, after it, future ages. The present age, as it approached, was agile, skilful, vibrant, proud, a little verbose, audacious, learned, but in the end it was as miserable as the earlier ones. And so it passed, and so passed the others, with the same speed and monotony. I redoubled my attention; I stared with all my might; I was going at last to see the end — the end! — but then the speed of the parade increased beyond the speed of lightning, beyond all comprehension. Perhaps for this reason, objects began to change; some grew, some shrank, others were lost in the surroundings; a mist covered everything — except the hippopotamus who had brought me there, and he began to grow smaller, smaller, smaller, until he became the size of a cat. Indeed, it was a cat. I looked at it carefully; it was my cat Sultan, playing at the door of the bedroom with a paper ball... </tab></font color></p>
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