Dom Casmurro 20.36 · 20.36

Three words, inverted for emphasis, and the narrator concedes the case against himself. "Sublimes não eram" — whatever these agitations were, they were not noble. He puts the grand adjective first only to knock it down, the syntax itself performing the deflation.

The concession is strategic. By admitting the prayers lacked all sublimity, Dom Casmurro keeps the reader's trust and forestalls the charge of dressing up a squalid little bargain as devotion. It is the honesty of a man who would rather indict himself than be caught out. Yet there is a melancholy under the wit: the older Bento, looking back, finds nothing elevated in his younger fear, only the raw arithmetic of self-interest. Machado's memoirist is at his most reliable precisely when he is confessing his own smallness — which is also, of course, when he is most persuasive, most likely to be believed on the larger matters where he is not to be trusted at all.

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