The title of this poetic and thought-provoking book comes from its first text, which contains a simile. In order to develop a pearl, says the acclaimed author and lecturer, an oyster must have the unpleasant company of a grain of sand inside its shell. For the oyster, that pearl will be no adornment, but mere protection against the discomfort caused by the sand. So, a happy oyster yields no pearl, just as a happy human being will not create art. No art is created without pain, even if that pain is light, "like the itching provoked by curiosity" (12). The short text that explains this idea is but one of hundreds gathered in this volume. Alves notes that when fragmentary thoughts came to him, he wrote them down, so that later they might grow into an essay. Those small thoughts were like birds that sat on his shoulder and remained "in the cages of his notebook." He never had enough time to allow them all to become full texts, and then he realized it was time to release them as they came: no matter how short or incipient. In the present volume, those fragments are divided into 11 topical sections. All of them, but the first (Kaleidoscope), display thematic cohesion: Love, Beauty, Children, Education, Nature, Politics, Mental Health, Religion, Old Age, and Death. Born and raised till puberty in Boa Esperanc ʹa, Minas Gerais, Alves moved with his family to Rio in 1945. With a Ph.D. from the Princeton Theological Seminary, he has been teaching college and living in Campinas, Sa o Paulo, since 1973. Some of Alves' books are regarded as foundational texts for the Liberation Theology movement of the 1980s. Characterized by a poetic but unpretentious language, his {cro nicas} confirm the breadth and depth of his intellect in pedagogy, psychology, philosophy, and theology, plus all the richness of his firsthand experiences through a long and multifaceted professional career as an unusually open-minded clergyman, social activist, and psychiatrist.