O Porquê da Historia

I n these times of short, selective attention, when anything longer than three lines is called a “wall of text,” the crônica a brief literary column rooted in everyday life might seem excessive. It isn’t. It is literature in miniature: quick, uncomplicated, and entertaining. It may begin with an ordinary detail, a piece of national news, or a phenomenon examined in a few short paragraphs. It may leave the reader untouched, or give them a gentle nudge. The crônica is light and free. At the very least, it should offer a few minutes of unpretentious enjoyment especially when it wins the reader over with its title or its opening line. It may have a short life, becoming outdated and irrelevant with the turn of a page or the close of a day. Or it may not. Drummond, Braga, Machado, Lispector, and so many others wrote treasures that remain beautiful decades later.

The novelist is obsessive. Like a worker bee, the writer carries a story buzzing in their mind and works tirelessly to turn thought into text, letter by letter, across countless pages. This determined storyteller shuts out the world while plunging into an imagined universe: characters come to life, villains drip with poison and vengeance, heroes struggle, win, and lose. Settings take shape out of thin air coherent and real in their very nonexistence.

The columnist is a curious, nosy creature. Their attention alights on any detail in the world that catches their eye, and they venture a few opinions. Writing about everything, they are committed to almost nothing beyond being honest and true to their own sensibility and memory. They don’t have the academic’s seriousness, the journalist’s supposed integrity, the cartographer’s precision, or the encyclopedist’s range. The columnist invents, exaggerates, makes jokes, pokes fun, or turns to poetry. Detached from everything, they are free to write about any subject but they cannot be detached from themselves or inattentive to the nuances of daily life. Life, my dear reader, happens in the details. Yet because we are always distracted by the scenery, the crônica invites us to pay attention: “Have you ever noticed that...?”

For me, the beauty of the crônica emerges when it reaches beyond its calling as an unpretentious piece of writing and becomes a sharp or gentle critique of the dull routine: that frantic, senseless gallop of reality, a machine that takes us everywhere but never lets us truly know ourselves.

The crônica first appeared in newspapers as a respite from pages that were bleak, bureaucratic, impartial, or dense: reports from the trenches in wartime, economic crises, epidemics, poverty, crime, corruption, and impunity. Later, it found its way into magazines with the same purpose: to entertain or draw attention, to make people laugh or think. A brief, light piece about something else entirely a literary oasis in the desert, or a homeopathic dose of criticism, humor, poetry, or lightness. A way to help us see simple things more seriously, or to take small details more seriously.

And it is right there, on the last page, that readers will find a crônica written by me with complete irresponsibility starting with this third edition of Rio Arquitetura & Design. After exploring projects around the world, learning the stories of Brazilian entrepreneurs, and discovering news from our community, I invite readers to pause. In this issue, I ask: if you are thinking of buying, renovating, moving, building, or decorating your home, how do you imagine living in it? Will it be a temporary home or a permanent one? Have you ever stopped to think about that?

My intention? None at all and all of them at once. Above all, I want to invite readers to stop, look around, and recognize the immense privilege of being alive, aware, and sharing the same planet at the same time. Though we carry different stories, we human beings of the twenty-first century are far more alike than we imagine.