The Stone Raft by José Saramago

They arrived in Lisbon as night was falling, at that hour when the gentle light fills souls with sweet remorse, now one sees how right that admirable judge of sensations and impressions was when he maintained that landscape was a state of mind, what he was not able to tell us was what it looked like in the days when there was nothing but pithecanthropus in the world, with as yet scant soul, and not just scant but confused as well. Thousands of years later, and thanks to evolution, Pedro Orce can now recognize in the apparent melancholy of the city the faithful image of his own intimate sadness. He had grown accustomed to the company of these Portuguese who had come to look for him in those inhospitable parts where he was born and lived, soon they will have to go their separate ways, each man to his own destination, not even families can resist the erosion of necessity, so what are mere acquaintances to do, friends of recent vintage and delicate roots.

Deux Chevaux crosses the bridge slowly, at the lowest speed permitted, to give the Spaniard time to admire the beauty of the views of land and sea, and also the impressive feat of engineering that links the two banks of the river, this construction, we are referring to the sentence, is periphrastic, and is used here to avoid repeating the word bridge, which would result in a solecism, of the pleonastic or redundant kind. In the various arts, and above all in that of writing, the shortest distance between two points, even if close to each other, has never been and never will be, nor is it now, what is known as a straight line, never, never, to put it strongly and emphatically in response to any doubts, to silence them once and for all. The travelers were so absorbed in the wonders of the city, so thrilled by this prodigious achievement, that they did not even notice how the starlings suddenly took fright.