Joseph Conrad - O Duelo

The duel in its strangest and most mythical dimension.

“[...] this Duel remains one of the most accomplished literary expressions of life's contingency in the face of the codes of honor to which it, through the ennobled absurdities of a civilization, has accepted submission. In the sixteen years covered by its four chapters, two soldiers construct a destiny of violence without motive; in their intervals of peace they periodically duel, finding in the mythical prestige of Napoleon and in an exacerbated sense of honor the magic capable of resurrecting that other, from the moments of war, which led them to the convulsive intoxication of death in smoke and fire in the charges against the enemy. The fading of this energy in the tranquility of professional retirement and the gentleness of bourgeois comfort appears to them as a melancholic decline.”

Aníbal Fernandes