For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what's left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny? Not knowing nor able to know what religious life is, since faith isn't acquired through reason, and unable to have faith in or even react to the abstract notion of man, we're left with the aesthetic contemplation of life as our reason for having a soul. Impassive to the solemnity of any and all worlds, indifferent to the divine, and disdainers of what is human, we uselessly surrender ourselves to pointless sensation, cultivated in a refined Epicureanism, as befits our cerebral nerves.
~ 3 ~
Walking on those streets, until the night falls, my life feels to me like the life they have. By the day they're full of meaningless activity; by night they're full of a meaningless lack of it. By day I am nothing, and by night I am I. There is no difference between me and these streets, save they being streets and I a soul, which perhaps is irrelevant when we consider the essence of things. There is an equal, abstract destiny for men and for things; both have an equally indifferent designation in the algebra of the world's mystery.
But there's something else... In these languid and empty hours, a sadness felt by my entire being rises from my soul to my mind – a bitter awareness that everything is a sensation of mine and at the same time something external, something no in my power to change.
a collective mishmash of life.
~ 4 ~
The nocturnal glory of being great without being anything! The sombre majesty of splendours no one knows... And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world.
~ 6 ~
I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed b the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me — this was denied me, like the spare change me might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat.
~ 7 ~
I wouldn't be able to leave it (note: mundane/routine people in his banal life) without crying, without feeling that, like it or not, it was a part of me which would remain with all of them, and that to separate myself from them would be a partial death.
Some are exploited by God himself, and they are prophets and saints in this vacuous world.
I love all this, perhaps because I have nothing else to love, and perhaps also because nothing is worth a human soul's love, and so it is all the same — should we feel the urge to give it — whether the recipient be the diminutive form of my inkstand or the vast indifference of the stars.
~ 9 ~
Art, which gives me relief from life without relieving me of living, being as monotonous as life itself, only in a different place.
~ 10 ~
My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same.
~ 12 ~
What is there to confess that's worthwhile or useful? What has happened to us has happened to everyone or only to us; if to everyone, then it's no novelty, and if only to us, then it won't be understood. If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
~ 14 ~
We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that's finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbor who's crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it's even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That's enough for me, or isn't enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.
To heed the present moment isn't a great or lasting concern of mine. I crave time in all its duration, and I want to be myself unconditionally.
~ 15 ~
Inch by inch I conquered the inner terrain I was born with. Bit by bit I reclaimed the swamp in which I'd languished. I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps.
~ 16 ~
I lost myself in abstract contemplations.
~ 18 ~
An income sufficient for food and drink, a roof over my head, and a little free time in which to dream and write, to sleep — what more can I ask for of the Gods or expect from Destiny?
I've had great ambitions and boundless dreams, but so has the delivery boy or the seamstress, because everyone has dreams. What distinguishes certain of us is our capacity for fulfilling them, or our destiny that they be fulfilled.
In dreams I am equal to the delivery boy and the seamstress. I differ from them only in knowing how to write. Yes, writing is an act, a personal circumstance that distinguishes me from them. But in my soul I'm their equal.
Perhaps my destiny is to remain forever a bookkeeper, with poetry or literature as butterfly that alights on my head, making me look ridiculous to the extent it looks beautiful.
~ 21 ~
Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.
~ 23 ~
The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.
~ 25 ~
Some govern the world, others are the world. Between an American millionaire, a Caesar or Napoleon, or Lenin, and the Socialist leader of a small town, there's a difference in quantity but not of quality. Below them there's us, the unnoticed: the reckless playwright William Shakespeare, John Milton the schoolteacher, Dante Alighieri the tramp, the delivery boy who ran an errand for me yesterday, the barber who tells me jokes, and the waiter who just now demonstrated his camaraderie by wishing me well, after noticing I'd drunk only half the wine.
~ 26 ~
To give each emotion a personality, a heart to each state of the heart!
~ 27 ~
Literature — which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality — seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self.
What moves lives. What is said endures. There is nothing in life that is less real for having been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it's a nice day. But to say it's a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It is up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new starts over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.
Right now I have so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say that I suddenly feel tired, and I've decided to write no more, think no more.
~ 28 ~
A breath of music or of a dream, of something that would make me almost feel, something that would make me not think.
~ 31 ~
Divided between tired and restless, I succeed in touching — with the awareness of my body — a metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things. Sometimes my soul starts fading, and then the random details of daily life float on the surface of consciousness, and I find myself entering amounts while floundering in sleeplessness.
To cease, to be the ebb and flow of a vast sea, fluidly skirting real shores, on a night in which one really sleeps!... To cease, to be unknown and external, a swaying of branches in distant rows of tree, a gentle falling of leaves, their sound noted more than their fall, the ocean spray of far-off fountains, and all the uncertainty of parks at night, lost in endless tangles, natural labyrinths of darkness!...
the silence of the house touches infinity.
I suffer without feeling or thinking.
~ 34 ~
Not pleasure, nor glory, not power... Freedom, only freedom.
To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is merely to change cells. Art, if it frees us from the abstract idols of old, should also free us from magnanimous ideas and social concerns, which are likewise idols.
To find your personality by losing it — faith itself endorses this destiny.
~ 35 ~
Everything useful and external tastes frivolous and trivail in the light of my soul's supreme reality and next to the pure sovereign splendour of my more original and frequent dreams. These, for me, are more real.
~ 36 ~
It's the people who habitually surround me, the souls who know me through conversation and daily contact without knowing me at all — they're the ones who cause a salivary knot of physical disgust to form in my throat. It is the sordid monotony of their lives, outwardly parallel to my own, and their keen awareness that I am their fellow man — that is what dresses me in a convict's clothes, places me in a jail cell, and makes me apocryphal and beggarly.
And I start to wonder how I am able to go on, how I dare have the faint-heartedness to be here among these people, exactly like them, in true conformity to their shoddy illusion. Like flashes from a distant lighthouse, I see all the solutions offered by the imagination's female side: flight, suicide, renunciation, grandiose acts of our aristocratic self-awareness, the swashbuckling novel of existences without balconies.
~ 38 ~
I envy all people, because I am not them.
~ 39 ~
In this moment of seeing, I suddenly find myself isolated, an exile where I'd always thought I was a citizen. At the heart of my thoughts I wasn't I.
This sudden awareness of my true being, of this being that has always sleepily wandered between what it feels and what it sees, weights on me like an untold sentences to serve.
I was someone else for a long time — since birth and consciousness — and suddenly I have woken up in the middle of a bridge, leaning over the river and knowing that I exist more solidly than the person I was up till now. But the city is unknown to me, the streets are new, and the trouble has no cure. And so, leaning over the bridge, I wait for the truth to go away and let me return to being fictitious and non-existent, intelligent and natural.
I saw the truth for a moment. For a moment I as consciously what great men are their entire lives. I recall their words and deeds and wonder if they were also successfully tempted by the Demon of Reality. To know nothing about yourself is to live. To know yourself badly is to think. To know yourself in a flash, as I did in this moment, is to have a fleeting motion of the intimate monad, the soul's magic word. But that sudden light scorches everything, consumes everything. It strips us naked of even ourselves.
~ 40 ~
Humanity is afraid of death, but indecisively.
Whenever I see a dead body, death seems to me a departure. The corpse looks to me like a suit that was left behind. Someone went away and didn't need to take the one and only outfit he'd worn.
~ 41 ~
To be something, anything, that doesn't feel the weight of the rain outside, nor the anguish of inner emptiness... To wander without thought or soul — sensation without sensation — along mountain roads and through valleys hidden between steep slops, into the far distance, irrevocably immersed... To be lost in landscapes like paintings... A colored non-existence in the background...
~ 44 ~
It's like being intoxicated with inertia, drunk but with no enjoyment in the drinking or in the drunkenness. It's a sickness with no hope of recovery. It's a lively death.
~ 45 ~
To live a dispassionate and cultured life in the open air of ideas, reading, dreaming and thinking of writing — a life so slow it constantly verges on tedium, but pondered enough never to find itself there. To live this life far from emotions and thought, living it only in the thought of emotions and in the emotion of thoughts. (... ...) To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the starts for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more... The music of the hungry beggar, the song of the blind man, the relic of the unknown wayfarer, the tracks in the desert of the camel without burden or destination...
~ 49 ~
Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person — of any person whatsoever — instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me it is a counterstimulus, if this compound word be linguistically permissible.
The idea of any social obligation whatsoever (... ...) the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the might before, so that I sleep badly.
"My habits are of solitude, not of men." I don't know if it was Rousseau or Senancour who said this. But it was some mind of my species, it being perhaps too much to say of my race.
~ 50 ~
The beauty of a naked body is only appreciated by cultures that use clothing. Modesty is important for sensuality like resistance for energy.
Artificiality is the best way to enjoy what's natural. Whatever I've enjoyed in these vast fields I've enjoyed because I don't live there. One who has never lived under constraints doesn't know what freedom is.
Civilization is an education in nature. Artificiality is the path for appreciating what's natural. We should never, however, take the artificial for the natural.
It's the harmony between the natural and the artificial that constitutes the natural state of the superior human soul.
~ 53 ~
It is human to want what we need, and it is human to desire what we don't need but find desirable. Sickness occurs when we desire what we need and what's desirable with equal intensity, suffering out lack of perfection as if we were suffering for lack of bread. The Romantic malady is to want the moon as if it could actually be obtained.
"You can't have your cake and eat it too."
The pagan didn't know, in the real world, this sickly dimension of things and of himself. Being human, he also desired the impossible, but he didn't crave it. His religion was ☐ and only in the inner sanctum of mystery, only to the initiated, far from the common people and the ☐, was it given to know the transcendental things of religions that fill the soul with the world's emptiness.
~ 55 ~
However much my soul may be descended from the Romantics, I can find no peace of mind except in reading classical authors. The very sparseness by which their clarity is expressed comforts me in some strange way. From them I get a joyful sense of expansive life that contemplates large open spaces without actually traveling through them. Even the pagan gods take a rest from the unknown.
The obsessive analysis of our sensations (sometimes of merely imagined sensations), the identification of our heart with the landscape, the anatomic exposure of all our nerves, the substitution of desire for the will and of longing for thinking – all these things are far too familiar to be of interest to me or to give me peace when expressed by another. Whenever I feel them, and precisely because I feel them, I wish I were feeling something else. And when I read a classical author, that something else is given to me.
I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I cease being myself and so scattered.
I read as one who's passing through. And it's in classical writers, in the calm-spirited, in those who if they suffer don't mention it... ...
~ 58 ~
Everything comes from outside, and the human soul itself may be no more than the ray of sunlight that shines and isolates from the soil the pile of dung that's the body.
~ 59 ~
If there's any justice in the Gods' injustice, then may they let us keep our dreams, even when they're impossible, and may our dreams be happy, even when they're trivial.
Some are heroes who flattered five men on a street corner just yesterday. Others are seducers to whom even non-existent women have surrendered. They believe these things when they tell them, and perhaps they tell them so as to believe. Others... For them the world's conquerors, whoever they may be, are everyday people.
And like eels in a wooden tub, they slither under and over each other, without ever leaving the tub. Sometimes they're mentioned in the newspapers. Some of them are mentioned rather often. But they never become famous.
There people are happy, for they've been given the enchanted dream of stupidity. But those, like me, who've been given dreams without illusions...
~ 62 ~
I'm a well of gestures that haven't even all been traced in my mind, of words I haven't even thought to form on my lips, of dreams I forgot to dream to the end.
Blessed are those who entrusted their lives to no one.
~ 62 ~
I am physically nauseated by commonplace humanity, which is the only kind there is. And sometimes I willfully aggravate the nausea, like someone who induces vomiting to be relieved of the urge to vomit.
Intrigue, gossip, the loud boasting over what one didn't have the guts to do, the contentment of each miserable creature dressed in the unconscious consciousness of his own soul, sweaty and smelly sexuality, the jokes they tell like monkeys tickling each other, their appalling ignorance of their utter unimportance... All of this leaves me with the impression of a monstrous and vile animal created in the chaos of dreams, out of desires' soggy crusts, out of sensations' chewed-up leftovers.
~ 63 ~
The entire life of the human soul is mere motions in the shadows. We live in a twilight of consciousness, never in accord with whom we are or think we are. Everyone harbors some kind of vanity, and there's an error whose degree we cannot determine. We are something that goes on during the show's intermission; sometimes, through certain doors we catch a glimpse of what may be no more than scenery. The world is one big confusion, like voices in the night.
I'm like someone searching at random, not knowing what object he is looking for nor where it was hidden. We play hide-and-seek with no one. There is a transcendent trick in all of this, a fluid divinity we can only hear.
Yes, I reread these pages that represent worthless hours, brief illusions or moments of calm, large hopes channeled into the landscape, sorrows like closed rooms, certain voices, a huge weariness, the unwritten gospel.
We all have our vanity, and vanity is our way of forgetting that there are other people with a soul like our own. My vanity consists of a few pages, passages, doubts...
I reread? A lie! I don't dare reread. I cannot reread. What good would it do me to reread? The person in the writing is someone else. I no longer understand a thing...
~ 64 ~
I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes.
~ 68 ~
The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence. There are unconscious forms of intelligence — flashes of wit, waves of understanding, mysteries and philosophies — that are like bodily reflexes, that operate as automatically as the liver or kidneys handle their secretions.
~ 70 ~
If I have no other virtue, I at least have the permanent novelty of free, uninhibited sensation.
(watching the back of a man) I suddenly felt something like tenderness for that man. I felt the tenderness one feels for common human banality, for the daily routine of the family breadwinner going to work, for his humble and happy home, for the happy and sad pleasures that necessarily make up his life, for the innocence of living without analyzing, for the animal naturalness of that coat-covered back.
He walks unconsciously, lives unconsciously. He sleeps, for we all sleep. All life is a dream. No one knows what he's doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That's why, whenever this sensation rules my thoughts, I feel an enormous tenderness that encompasses the whole of childish humanity, that whole of sleeping society, everyone, everything.
~ 71 ~
The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts.
For the ordinary man, to feel is to live, and to think is to know how to live, For me, to think is to live, and to feel is merely food for thoughts.
~ 72 ~
It would be better to say that a state of emotion is a landscape, for the phrase would contain not the lie of a theory but the truth of a metaphor.
May the Gods all preserve for me (until my present form ceases) this clear and sunlit view of external reality, the instinctive awareness of my unimportance, the cosiness of being small, and the solace of being able to imagine myself happy.
~ 73 ~
A rich man breathes easier; a famous man is freer; a title of nobility is itself a small hill. Everything is artifice, but not even the artifice is ours. We climb it, or were brought to it, or we were born in the house on the hill.
Great, however, is the man who realizes that the difference in distance from the valley to the sky and from the hill to the sky makes no difference. Should the flood water rise, we're better off in the hills. But when God curses us as Jupiter, with lightning bolts, or as Aeolus, with high winds, then the best cover will be to have remained in the valley, and the best defence to lie low.
Wise is the man who has the potential for height in his muscles but who renounces climbing in his consciousness. By virtue of his gaze, he has all hills, and by virtue of his position, all valleys. The sun that gilds the summits will gild them more for him than for someone at the top who must endure the bright light; and the palace perched high in the woods will be more beautiful for those who see it from the valley than for those who, imprisoned in its rooms, forget it.
I take comfort in these reflections, since I cannot take comfort in life. And the symbol merges with reality when, as a transient body and soul in these low-lying streets that lead to the Tagus, I see the luminous heights of the city glowing, like a glory from beyond, with the various lights of a sun that has already set.
~ 75 ~
A sunset is an intellectual phenomenon.
~ 77 ~
No one will ever passionately be my friend. That's is why so many are able to respect me.
~ 78 ~
Certain sensations are slumbers that fill up our mind like a fog and prevent us from thinking, from acting, from clearly and simply being.
It is not tedium that we feel. Nor is it grief. It's a desire to sleep with another personality, to be able to forget everything with a pay increase.
~ 79 ~
My il-starred hopes, born of the life I've been forced to live! They are like this hour and this air, fogless fogs, unravelled basing of a false storm.
... ... All for not knowing how to say, as in that simple and all-embracing phrase from the Book of Job, "My soul is weary of my life!"
~ 80 ~
There is a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However, clearly I see and understand life, I can't touch it.
Rationalize my sadness? What for, if rationalization takes effort? Sad people cannot make an effort.
How often I regret not being the driver of that car or the coachman of that carriage! Or any imaginary banal Other whose life, because it is not mine, deliciously fills me with desire for it and fills me with its otherness! If I were one of them, I wouldn't dread life like a Thing, and the thought of life as a Whole wouldn't crush the shoulders of my thinking.
~ 82 ~
I know only that the tedium I suffer shifts and gives me a moment's relief, as when a piece of clothing stops rubbing against a sore.
All that we love or lose—things, human beings, meanings—rubs our skin and so reaches the soul, and in the eyes of God the event is no more than this breeze that brought me nothing besides an imaginary relief, the propitious moment, and the wherewithal to lose everything splendidly.
~ 83 ~
Suddenly I am all alone in the world. I see all this from the summit of a mental rooftop. I am alone in the world. To see is to be distant. To see clearly is to halt. To analyze is to be foreign. No one who passes by touches me. Around me there is only air. I am so isolated I can feel the distance between me and my suit. I am a child in a nightshirt carrying a dimly lit candle and traversing a huge empty house.
~ 84 ~
these two principles as general foundations of all good style: 1) to express what one feels exactly as it is felt — clearly, if it is clear; obscurely, if obscure; confusedly, if confused 2) to understand that grammar is an instrument and not a law.
Let grammar rule the man who does't know how to think what he feels. Let it serve those who are in command when they express themselves.
~ 85 ~
The creation of something complete and whole, be it good or bad – and if it is never entirely good, it is very often not all bad... A complete thing is like a child; although imperfect like everything human, it belongs to us like our own children.
Better either the complete work, which is in any case a work, even if it's bad, or the absence of words, the unbroken silence of the soul that knows it is incapable of acting.
~ 89 ~
The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.
~ 90 ~
To see something in constantly new ways is to renew and multiply it. That is why the contemplative person, without ever leaving his village, will nevertheless have the whole universe at his disposal. There is infinity in a cell or a desert.
But there are times in our meditation—and they come to all who meditate—when everything is suddenly worn-out, old, seen, and resign, even though we have yet to see it. Because no matter how much we meditate on something, and through meditation transform it, whatever we transform it into can only be the substance of meditation. At a certain point we are overwhelmed by a yearning for life, by a desire to know without the intellect, to meditate with only our sense, to think in a tactile or sensory mode, from inside the object of our thought, as if it were a sponge and we were water.
To ignore so as to live! To feel in order to forget!
~ 91 ~
Life being fundamentally a mental state, and all that we do or think valid to the extent we consider it valid, the valuation depends on us.
~ 93 ~
The life of my emotion moved early on to the chambers of thought, and that's where I've most fully lived my emotional experience of life.
By thinking so much, I become echo and abyss. By delving within, I made myself into many.
~ 95 ~
We are who we're not, and life is quick and sad. The sound of the waves at night is a sound of the night, and how many have heard it in their own soul, like the perpetual hope that dissolves in the darkness with a faint plash of distant foam!
~ 97 ~
The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armor of realities closer to him than the world's facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.
... ...
~ 229 ~
To read is to dream, guided by someone else's hand. To read carelessly and distractedly is to let go of that hand. To be only superficially learned is the best way to read well and be profound.
To die is to become completely other. That's why suicide is a cowardice: it's to surrender ourselves completely to life.
~ 230 ~
One of the soul's great tragedies is to execute a work and then realize, once it's finished, that it's not any good. The tragedy is especially great when one realizes that the work is the best he could have done.
Art is a substitute for acting or living. If life is the willful expression of emotion, art is the intellectual expression of that same emotion. Whatever we don't have, don't attempt or don't achieve can be possessed through dreams, and these are what we use to make art. At other times our emotion is so strong that, although reduced to action, this action doesn't completely satisfy it; the leftover emotion, unexpressed in life, is used to produce the work of art. There are thus two types of artist: the one who expresses what he doesn't have, and the one who expresses the surplus of what he did have.
~ 231 ~
I wrote my first poems when I was still a child. Though dreadful, they seemed perfect to me. I'll never again be able to have the illusory pleasure of producing perfect work. What I write today is much better. It's even better than what some of the best writers write. But it's infinitely inferior to what I for some reason feel I could—or perhaps should—write.
~ 232 ~
These two truths (in the previous paragraphs, Pessoa stated: the first is that next to the reality of life all the fictions of literature and art pale; the other truth is that a noble soul has to live life subjectively, by denying life can it be lived in its totality) are mutually exclusive. The wise man won't try to reconcile them, nor will he dismiss one or the other. But he will have to follow one or the other, yearning at times for the one he didn't choose; or he'll dismiss them both, rising above himself in a personal nirvana.
~ 233 ~
... the solemn sadness that dwells in all great things — in high mountains and in great men, in profound nights and eternal poems.
~ 234 ~
We can die if all we've done is love.
... ...
~ 359 ~
No one understands anyone else. We are, as the poet* said, islands in the sea of life; between us flows the sea that defines and separates us. However much one soul strives to know another, he can know only what is told him by a word – a shapeless shadow on the ground of his understanding.
