Dom Casmurro 2.24 · 2.24

'O mais é também analogo e parecido' — the rest, too, is analogous and alike. He waves a hand over everything else — all the details he will not itemize — and pronounces them matching. But listen to the two words he chooses: 'analogo', analogous, and 'parecido', alike, resembling. Neither is 'igual', identical. He has quietly stopped claiming sameness and settled for likeness. Across this paragraph the vocabulary has been slipping — from 'o mesmo', the same, to 'mais ou menos egual', more or less identical, to now merely 'analogo e parecido', similar and resembling. The reproduction, described honestly, keeps confessing itself a resemblance and not a restoration. This is the whole tragedy of the enterprise compressed into an adjective. What you can rebuild of the past is always only 'parecido' — like it, near it, reminiscent of it — never it. And a man who cannot tell, or will not admit, the difference between the thing and its likeness is a man set up for a very particular kind of ruin: the whole plot of Dom Casmurro turns on resemblances taken for proofs.

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