the posthumous memoirs of brás cubas goodreads

I stood there, looking at the corpse with, I confess, a certain sympathy. “Why the devil couldn’t it have been blue?” I said to myself.Īnd this thought-one of the most profound ever made since the discovery of butterflies-consoled me for my misdeed and reconciled me with myself. And so it passed, and so passed the others, with the same speed and monotony.” The present age, as it approached, was agile, skillful, vibrant, proud, a little verbose, audacious, learned, but in the end it was as miserable as the earlier ones. My tired eyes finally saw the present age go by end, after it, future ages. 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.

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. “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. And this is the great advantage in being dead, that if you have no mouth with which to laugh, neither have you eyes with which to cry.”

You want to live fast, to get to the end, and the book ambles along slowly you like straight, solid narrative and a smooth style, but this book and my style are like a pair of drunks they stagger to the right and to the left, they start and they stop, they mutter, they roar, they guffaw, they threaten the sky, they slip and fall.Īnd fall! Unhappy leaves of my cypress tree, you had to fall, like everything else that is lovely and beautiful if I had eyes, I would shed a tear of remembrance for you. But the book is tedious, it smells of the tomb, it has a rigor mortis about it a serious fault, and yet a relatively small one, for the great defect of this book is you, reader. Not that it bores me I have nothing else to do indeed, it is a welcome distraction from eternity. “I am beginning to be sorry that I ever undertook to write this book.

The posthumous memoirs of brás cubas goodreads