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

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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.

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.

When the doctor is completely naked, sitting embarrassedly on the edge of the examination table, the patient raises himself from the armchair, flashes a sympathetic smile and starts.

The examination itself lasts no more than ten minutes. Displaying the disengaged skill of someone who has done this innumerable times, the patient studies the doctor’s surface, his elasticity, his echoes, his reactions. He blinks uncertainly at his orifices, feels gently but without passion his mucosae, investigates the spaces between his toes. The patient spends two entire minutes looking without blinking into the doctor’s weary eyes. He presses the cartilage of the ears, feels the veins of the neck, touches the forearms as if in search of something. He massages the hands of sweating palms, examines the texture of the knees, the folds of the penis. He taps gently the very white back, rubs the soles of the feet.

Then, wielding an entirely dispassionate, austere expression on his face, as if he had been busy auditing stock, not examining a human being, the patient declares himself finished.

“You may put on your clothes again now, please”, he announces, and then he quickly adds: “May I sit on your chair for a minute?”

“Sure”, says the doctor, both alarmed and displeased. He removes the stack of clothes from the table top and starts to dress himself quickly, as if to erase from the atmosphere of the room any vestige of his nakedness, while the patient pauses with his pen in his mouth before the open notebook he has just produced from his coat pocket.

The doctor is already lacing his shoes, and the patient hasn’t written anything as his prescription.

“So?”, the doctor finally asks, sitting again on the examination table. “Is everything OK?”

The patient presses his lips and looks deep into the doctor’s eyes.

“See, doctor, externally everything is fine”.

“But…” the doctor crosses his arms, as to receive the impact of any bad news. “You can tell me”.

The patient reclines on the chair, crossing his arms behind his head.

“But when I pressed my ear against your chest I heard something that worries me.”

Without uncrossing his arms, the doctor reclines himself and lies quietly on the examination table.

“I know what it is”, he says. “I can tell you myself”.

“Tell me, then,” asks the patient, gently, laying his forearms on the table and then resting his chin on them.

Still lying down, his eyes looking nervously at the ceiling as if looking for an answer, the doctor confesses in a trembling voice:

“It is the heart.”

The patient moves his eyes away and smiles bitterly to his own fingers, but he doesn’t refute.

After a long pause, during which he did not move a muscle, the doctor risks:

“Is there a cure?”

“Ah, doctor”, the patient smiles, waving his head in a slow movement, “there is no cure for anything and you know it”. And in the next moment, raising himself from the chair: “But I can give you a prescription. If you want it.”

The doctor rises immediately from the examination table and uncrosses his arms.

“A prescription is almost as good a thing as a cure”, he isn’t ashamed to rejoice.

“Specially for the heart”, it occurs the patient to say, raising his pen high, like a beer stein.

The patient writes in his prescription book, pulls out the page, folds it quickly and presses it with his two hands into one of the doctor’s hands.

“Now, doctor, pay attention. Life has charged you a heavy and, in great measure, unjust price. Each cured person cost a piece of your heart; the ones that haven’t been cured, God help us, cost something still more precious, we both know what”. The patient breathed deep, his eyes fixed on the doctor’s, demanding all his concentration. “Now about what remains: on this piece of paper I wrote a word, only one word. I want you to read it as soon I leave the room. If you smile and understand, and if everything works out, and for us both I feverishly pray it does, this one word will supply you for many days with what is necessary for you to change the dressings on your heart. Don’t forget that the good news, maybe the only good news, is the thing we have known from the beginning: even where there’s no cure, the dressings can always be changed. Good luck.”

And he left the room.

The doctor gave a deep sigh and sat down in his own chair, alone in his own office. He unfolded the paper with wet eyes and trembling hands, moaned a deep moan, full of all distress, and read the word.

It surprised him immediately, and it made him bring a hand to his mouth, and made him feel a way he hadn’t felt for many, many years. The word made him smile.

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There’s also the story of the prince who thought it unfair to live in such a magnificent palace, so wisely built and richly finished—and being unable to admire it in its entirety because of living in it.

“The poorest citizen has a privilege I don’t”, the prince said. “He can admire the beauty of my palace from the streets, the fields, from any window. I claim that right for myself”.

He asked the three wiser men in the kingdom to come up with a solution for his problem.

The first one offered encircling the palace within a huge wall, covered with mirrors on the inside. “So”, he said, “not only will the prince be able to enjoy the reflection of his own palace from every window, but the common people will be prevented to enjoy what becomes a prince only”.

The second wise man brought the project of an exact duplicate of the palace, to be built on a privileged spot not far from there, which could be easily confiscated for this end. “So the prince will be able to enjoy day and night, in all its glory, a faithful image of his own palace.”

The prince wasn’t appeased, until the third wise man spoke.

“For your problem, Your Majesty, there’s no solution”, he said. “Your Majesty thinks unfair to live in the palace without being able to admire its beauty as your vassals do. Believe me, Sir, that’s the least injustice of all. A far greater injustice lies in the fact that, Your Majesty being the fairest of all princes, it is we, the very least of your vassals, who enjoy the sight of Your Majesty daily. It’s proper of beauty, Your Majesty, not to be suitably enjoyed by its owner. Let these fancies go and be content with the paradox of beauty: having it without being able to enjoy it. Be the fairest of princes in the fairest of palaces, and leave to the rest of us what becomes us: to admire them”.

The prince believed him, got cool, and forgot the entire idea.