A interface do mundo é riquíssima; não apenas você pode clicar em todas as coisas, mas as próprias coisas clicam em você.

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The world’s interface is rich: you may click on anything, and things actually click on you.

IN HIS EARLIEST DREAMS AND IN THE DEEPEST INSIGHTS OF CHILDHOOD, before he collected his first arabesque-filled shells and dismantled jellyfish in the long morning walks at Moss Landing, Doe knew that the deep sea wasn’t a uniform, indistinct mass of water. He sensed it concealed powerful undersea currents, huge tunnels and corridors, crowded lanes, small alleys and colossal intersections of spacious liquid roads. As the airman who dwells in the sky, Doe dreamed, one day man would be able to know and to control the ascendant and descendant breezes that blow under the rough, deceitful surface of the oceans. Below the superficial currents that navigators have known for centuries, there would be deeper ones, subtler and infinitely richer in secrets. As he gazed at the lonely shores, with the thirsty surf endlessly washing his feet and legs, Doe tortured himself dreaming that there would be more below, much more, shrouded by miles of sticky water, the freezing abyss and the absolute darkness.

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O primeiro parágrafo de uma história de que não me lembro mais nada e da qual não resta mais do que isso. Lembro apenas que escrevi em 1998 depois de ter lido The Universe Below. Não tenho certeza, mas espero que tivesse um monstro. Em inglês no original.

The first paragraph from a story I don’t remember anything else about. Written in 1998 under de influence of The Universe Below. Here’s hoping there was a monster in it.

Desde o momento em que você nasce as pessoas começam a falar sobre você umas com as outras, sem que você tenha acesso direto ao conteúdo do que elas dizem e sem que possa interferir com a mesma liberdade criativa nas concepções que desenvolvem a seu respeito.

Com o tempo, os rumores a seu respeito tornar-se cada vez mais associados a você; quando você chega, o que as pessoas de fato enxergam é uma complexa obra de ficção, uma impressão formada tanto ou mais pelo conjunto total dos rumores a seu respeito quanto pelo que você de fato já disse ou fez.

Somos, cada um de nós, uma obra coletiva.

Since the day you are born people begin to talk with one another about you – you don’t have direct access to the content of their talk, and you don’t really have a say (with the same creative freedom they enjoy) in the developing notions about you.

With time, the rumors about you became more and more associated with you; when you arrive [at the room] what people actually see is a complex work of fiction, an impression formed as much by the total mass of rumors about you as by what you actually said or did.

We are, each of us, a collective work.

Sensible English tips
provided by Maeve Vella

The patient enters the doctor’s office and closes the door behind him.

“Good afternoon”, he extends his hand. “How are you?”

“Fine”, assures the doctor, but he shakes the patient’s hand with a sweating hand, his voice revealing a cultivated anxiety.

“Please forgive my delay”, the patient says, making himself comfortable in the available armchair. “I was seeing the doctor in the room next to this one”.

“Dr. Renato? Is he OK?”

For answer the patient shakes his head in a pendular movement, a gesture that the doctor interprets as meaning “so-so”, or perhaps “none of your business”.

“What about you?” The patient wants to change the direction of the conversation. “Are you alright?”

“I was hoping you’d tell me”, the doctor nervously discloses, reclining a bit in his black leather chair, his very hairy hands crossed on the table.

“We’ll see to that presently” the patient says, lowering his eyes and starting to examine the stack of magazines on the nearby coffee table. ” You may take off your clothes, please, and sit on that examination table over there.”

The doctor gets up and, without a word, starts to take off his clothes: white jacket, streaked tie, linen shirt, t-shirt, German leather shoes, English stockings, Italian pants, black underwear – placing the folded pieces methodically on the table’s glass cover, next to the plaque which witnesses his name and specialty. continue lendo >

I admire trees. They have the ability to grow without rushing into things.