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| Cabo Branco - João Pessoa |
"There are few of us
who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless
nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror
and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more
terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in
all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art
being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been
troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually fingers creep through the
curtains, and they appear to tremble. In back fantastic shapes, dumb shadows
crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the
stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their
work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering
round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, and yet must
needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of him dusty gauze
is lifted, and by degrees the forms and calours of things are restored to them,
and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors
get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them,
and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired
flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to
read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the
unreal shadows of night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to
resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of
the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped
habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning
upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a
world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or
have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or
survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the
remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their
pain".
(Oscar Wilde, in The Picture of Dorian Gray,Oxford World's Classics, 2008, págs. 109-110)
