Explore "Coexistence" by Carlos Drummond de Andrade on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The more I live, the more I embody this truth: they don't live except in us, and that's why they scarcely, faintly, and intermittently live.
Outside of us, in what we call time, they may have ceased to live.
And this negative eternity doesn't distress us.
However scarcely and poorly they live inside us, it's still life.
And we no longer have to face death, since we carry it around.
But how distant they are, even if they're our current guests and residents, our tissues and our blood! The wispiest external form reaches us.
The man over there exists. The bird exists.
And they also exist, but so obliquely! And even smiling, how they dissemble! It's better to stop searching.
We wouldn't find them, even if we found them.
To have and not have a holy vessel within us, a repository, an ongoing presence: such is our condition while, without the right conditions, we move through life and think we love and then are still.
Or perhaps we only exist in them, who've gone missing, and our existence is but an impure form of silence, which they preferred.