Dom Casmurro 2.17 · 2.17

The ceiling is described in loving, slightly comic detail: 'umas grinaldas de flores miudas e grandes passaros que as tomam nos bicos, de espaço a espaço' — garlands of tiny flowers and big birds taking them in their beaks, spaced out across it. It is the frankly gaudy ceiling of a prosperous nineteenth-century Rio parlour, and Bento reproduces it without apology, birds and all. But notice the painted birds are caught in a permanent gesture — forever taking the flowers in their beaks, an action begun and never completed, a motion frozen mid-air. The whole ceiling is time stopped: the seasons fixed in the corners, the birds arrested reaching for the blossoms. This is exactly what Bento wants and cannot have — the past held still, the moment kept from finishing. A painting can freeze a bird mid-snatch forever; nothing can freeze a life. The chapter keeps finding, in the very décor of the reproduced house, images of the arrest of time that the reproduction itself was meant to achieve and cannot.

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Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I