Chapter 7 - The World Keeps Changing to Remain the Same

Summary

Ecclesiastes

The Bible is one of the central literary sources for Machado. Despite not being a religious man, he was an avid reader of the Bible. One book, in particular, permeates his fiction with a vigorous presence: Ecclesiastes. Two of its most prominent messages can be summed up in the following quotes: “Vanity of vanities, said the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (1:2); and “The thing that has been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (1:9).

Also an avid reader of the Bible, Shakespeare wrote his Sonnet 59 based on the abovementioned second premise:

If there be nothing new, but that which is

Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,

Which, laboring for invention, bear amiss

The second burden of a former child!”

The metalinguistic question that this quatrain raises can be viewed as not only Shakespearean but also Machadian: why write if everything has already been written? The answer for both – and for Rousseau, too – is perfectibility. Ultimately, we, as humans, imitate imitations to make our own better (“Whether we are mended,” says Shakespeare), although sometimes our attempts happen to be worse than (“or whe’er better they”), or even equivalent to (“Or whether revolution be the same”), that which preceded them. Perfectibility, therefore, is linked to the notion of emulation, a concept that either directly or indirectly guides the literary creation of Shakespeare and Machado alike (see Chapter Eight, letter E).

“There is no new thing under the sun” inherently means, for its part, repetition. The world repeats itself, and history isn’t a line whose events dialectically advance towards an ultimate goal, as Hegel and Marx held to be true. History, instead, is a circle. In this context, changes – if I may call a piece of contemporary popular culture into the discussion – are like rainbows: they “are visions but only illusions.” This doesn’t mean that changes are useless or unnecessary. On the contrary, changes spin the wheel of history, make history come alive, and create a desired illusion of progress, while humanity – mostly without realizing it – continues to run around in circles, following the actual movement of history.