The Stone Raft by José Saramago

People neither knew nor suspected what was going on, such was the secrecy with which governments and scientific institutions set about investigating the subtle movement that was carrying the peninsula out to sea with enigmatic persistence and constancy. To discover how and why the Pyrenees had cracked was no longer a matter for discussion, any hope of redressing the situation was abandoned within days. Despite the vast amount of accumulated information, the computers coldly demanded fresh data or gave preposterous results, as in the case of the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose programmers blushed with embarrassment upon receiving on their terminals the peremptory diagnosis, Overexposure to the sun, would you believe.

In Portugal, perhaps because of the difficulty, even today, of ridding everyday speech of certain archaisms, the nearest conclusion we could reach was, The pitcher goes so often to the well that the handle finally stays there, a metaphor that only served to confuse people, since it wasn't a question of handles or wells or pitchers, but it is not difficult to perceive in it a reference to the effects of repetition, whose very nature, making allowances for frequency, is such that one never knows where it might end.