Whoever has read the pages of this book will by now surely have concluded that I’m a dreamer. And he will have concluded wrongly. I lack the money to be a dreamer.

Great melancholies and sorrows full of tedium can exist only in an atmosphere of comfort and solemn luxury. That’s why Poe’s Egaeus,* pathologically absorbed in thought for hours on end, lives in an ancient, ancestral castle where, beyond the doors of the lifeless drawing room, invisible butlers administer the house and prepare the meals.

Great dreams require special social circumstances. One day, when the doleful cadence of a certain passage I’d written made me excitedly think of Chateaubriand, it didn’t take me long to remember that I’m not a viscount, nor even a Breton. On another occasion, when I’d written something whose content seemed to recall Rousseau, it likewise didn’t take long for me to realize that, besides not being the noble lord of a castle, I also lack the privilege of being a wanderer from Switzerland.

But there is also the universe of the Rua dos Douradores. Here God also grants that the enigma of life knows no bounds. My dreams may be poor, like the landscape of carts and crates from among whose wheels and boards I conceive them, but they’re what I have and am able to have. The sunsets, to be sure, are somewhere else. But even from this fourth-floor room that looks out over the city, it’s possible to contemplate infinity. An infinity with warehouses down below, it’s true, but with stars up above… This is what occurs to me as I look out my high window at the close of day, with the dissatisfaction of the bourgeois that I’m not, and with the sadness of the poet that I can never be.