A summer of useful-useless readings

writing from beyond utility

It began with death. Or rather, with someone writing after death. Machado de Assis’s Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas) in Tinta da China’s edition. Here was uselessness itself: a dead man writing his autobiography, beginning from the grave with sarcasm, humor, and some bitterness about the life he left behind.

The book was written, as we know from the beginning, “with the pen of jest and the ink of melancholy.” What could be more useless than a dead author’s reflections? Yet this uselessness created one of Portuguese-language literature’s masterpieces. Brás Cubas, freed from life’s obligations, can finally tell the truth about the living. His uselessness becomes his authority.

Machado’s premise is liberating. Only in death can the narrator achieve the clarity to dissect life’s pretensions. The dead have no objectives to meet, no personal brand to maintain, no network to cultivate. From this position of complete uselessness comes literature of enduring use.

the collector’s paradox

This meditation on the useless dead made me receptive to Fredrik Sjöberg’s A Arte de Coleccionar Moscas (The Art of Collecting Flies), published this April by Livros Zigurate. The book’s intensity of curiosity ignited something in me. Here was another kind of death—the pinned specimens of an entomologist’s collection—transformed into a meditation on life.

The book is, as its subtitle suggests, halfway between memoir, natural history lesson, and philosophical reflection: a surprising meditation on happiness that is enchanting, contemplative, and full of humor. Sjöberg speaks of slowness, the poetry of waiting, the desire to collect that compensates for the chaos of existence. Here was an entomologist who had discovered 202 species of hoverfly on his tiny Swedish island—fifteen square kilometers of apparent nothing yielding endless fascination.

The book opens with Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso’s epigraph: “There are three themes: love, death, and flies.” Sjöberg takes this literally, using his seemingly useless obsession with these insects as a lens through which to observe the world with different eyes. What struck me wasn’t just the beauty of dedicating one’s life to something so apparently pointless, but how this dedication showed things I couldn’t see while rushing toward utility. As Sjöberg told Público in April, “collecting insects is a kind of yoga”—a way to exercise slowness and concentration so intense that one forgets oneself. In our age of productivity worship, such forgetting becomes resistance.

Ignorantly, I always questioned the utility of flies, as a way to mask my hatred for the animal. Now, after this book, I began to admire and, even possibly, love these irritating flying insects.

the velocity of forgetting

The book mentions writers like Chatwin, Kundera, and D.H. Lawrence, all fascinated by collecting. This reference to Kundera sent me searching, and I found myself ordering A Lentidão (Slowness) from Dom Quixote’s 2022 edition. I picked it up at a bookstore during a transition between Alentejo and Praia Grande.