God is the poet
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Deus é o poeta.
God is the poet.
The myth begins: God writes the words, the libretto of the world.
Four words lay the foundation of the whole cosmology: the universe is a work of art, and its author is God the librettist. Machado hands the oldest theological question — who made the world and why does it hurt — to the vocabulary of the theatre. Creation is not a garden or a machine but a text, a set of words waiting to be sung.
The move is quietly radical. If God only wrote the words, then the meaning of existence is authored elsewhere, and the beauty and the pain of living belong to a collaborator. The tenor's scheme lets Machado divide responsibility for the world in two, and the division prepares the sharp joke of the next sentence. For a novel obsessed with authorship — Bento authoring his own past, José Dias authoring rumors — beginning with God as writer is exactly right.
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Dom Casmurro 9.29 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/domcasmurro/9.29/