A house often contains its own relics, souvenirs of other times, of past sadness, lost happiness. Imagine that the owner of said house should, for your and my amusement, decide to expose those relics to the light of day. Not all of them will be interesting, a few may prove frankly dull, but if the owner chooses carefully, he can select those few that deserve an airing.
Call my life a house and give the name of “relic” to these hitherto unpublished, unprinted tales—ideas, stories, histories, dialogues—and you will have an explanation for both book and title. They will not perhaps enjoy the same imagined good fortune of others I did not choose, and not all of them will merit being brought out into the light. That is for you to judge, dear reader, and to forgive me if I have chosen badly.
Machado de Assis
My dearest, to this your final resting place,
In which you take repose from this long life,
I come and will come, my poor belovèd,
To bring you a companionable heart.
It beats with the same true affection
That, despite the usual human struggles,
Made ours an existence to be envied
And in one small corner built a world entire . . .
I bring you flowers—remnants plucked
From the earth that saw us live united
And leaves us separated now by death;
And if I, in my mortally wounded eyes,
Still harbor thoughts drawn from that life,
Those thoughts are of what was and is no more.