Dom Casmurro 2.48 · 2.48

'É outra cousa' — it's another thing. Three words that refuse the whole apparatus of ranking. Not better, not worse — simply other, a different kind of thing. Bento sets his old life and his present one side by side and declines to grade them, and the refusal has a quiet dignity. Comparison, after all, is the engine of misery: it was the compulsion to measure the copy against the original, the now against the then, that produced all the grief of the preceding lines. Here he lays the measuring-stick down. His two lives are 'outra cousa' from each other, incommensurable, each simply itself. It is the nearest the chapter comes to peace — an old man ceasing, for a moment, to weigh what he has lost against what he had, and letting the present be its own thing. The reprieve is real, if brief. And it prepares the turn the paragraph now makes, away from loss and toward the modest, genuine pleasures of the life he actually has: the garden, the books, the sound sleep. Having refused to call it worse, he can begin, cautiously, to describe what is good in it.

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