Dom Casmurro 5.70 · 5.70

The narrator credits José Dias with learning and undercuts it in the same breath: 'lido, posto que de atropello' — well-read, but in a scramble. 'Atropello' carries the sense of trampling haste, of knowledge grabbed on the run rather than settled by study. It is a precise diagnosis of the autodidact who has read widely and digested little.

Machado is describing a familiar type — the household intellectual whose culture is broad, shallow, and endlessly serviceable at the dinner table. The concessive 'posto que' is the narrator's scalpel, granting the merit only to qualify it. And there is affection mixed in: a man who reads hastily still reads, and his scraps of science and history are what make him useful and entertaining to the family. The next lines will list exactly what his hurried erudition was good for, and the catalogue is comic precisely because it is so miscellaneous.

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