The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (14 page)

You, German culture, a rancid Sparta dressed with the oil of Christianity and the vinegar of Nietzscheization, a sheet-metal beehive, an imperialistic horde of harnessed sheep!

You, subservient Austria, medley of subraces, a K-brand doorjamb!

You, Von Belgium, compelled to be heroic, now go wipe your hand and wash the seat of your pants!

You, Russian slavery, Europe of Malays who won a coil-spring freedom only because the coil snapped!

You, Spanish “imperialism” that adds pizzazz to politics, with your bullfighters around the corner (their souls dressed in sanbenitos) and your fighting spirit buried in Morocco!

You, United States of America, bastard synthesis of Europe’s scum, garlic of the transatlantic stew, nasalized pronunciation of tasteless modernism!

And you, two-bit Portugal, monarchical vestiges rotting as a republic, extreme-unction-compunction of Disgrace, artificially in Europe’s war but really and truly humiliated in Africa!

And you, Brazil, “sister republic,” great joke of Pedro Alvares Cabral, who didn’t even want to discover you!

Throw a cloth over all this!

Lock it up with a key and throw the key away!

Where are the ancients, real men, guiding forces, defenders?

Try the cemetery, where their names are chiseled in stone!

Today’s philosophy is Fouillee having died!

Today’s art is Rodin having survived!

Today’s literature is that Barres means something!

Today’s criticism is that there are idiots who don’t call Bourget an idiot!

Today’s politics is the fatty degeneration of organized incompetence!

Today’s religion is the militant Catholicism of pious bartenders, the French cuisine enthusiasm of pickled minds like Maurras’s, the exhibitionism of Christian pragmatists, Catholic institutionalists, nirvanic ritualists, advertising agents for God!

Today’s war is a game of one side passing the buck and the other side washing its hands.

I’m suffocating in the middle of all this!

Give me some air!

Open all the windows!

Open more windows than there are windows in the world!

Not one great idea, inspired notion, or imperial ambition worthy of a born emperor!

No idea of structure, no sense of the larger Edifice, no concern for Organic Creation!

Not one measly Pitt, nor even a pasteboard Goethe, nor a Napoleon of Nuremberg!

Not one literary movement that’s so much as the noonday shadow of Romanticism!

Not one military action that smells even remotely like Austerlitz!

Not one political movement that rattles with the seeds of ideas when you shake it, O you modern Gaius Gracchuses who patter at the window!

Vile age of quasi and second-rate individuals, of lackeys full of lackey ambitions to become lackey kings!

Lackeys who don’t know what Ambition is, bourgeois in your desires, spurning the shop counter of Instinct! Yes, all you who represent Europe, all you who are world-renowned politicians, all who are leaders among the European literati, all who are anyone or anything in this whirlpool of lukewarm tea!

* * *

Strong men of Lilliputian Europe, pass by as I shower you with my Contempt!

Pass by, you seekers after household comforts, seamstresses—male and female—in your dreams, who take as your model the plebeian D’Annunzio, aristocrat of the golden loincloth!

Pass by, you social, literary and artistic trendsetters, the tail side of the coin of creative impotence!

Pass by, you milksops who need to be ists of one or another ism!

Pass by, radicals of the Piddly, yokels of Progress, whose ignorance stands on the pillar of audacity and whose impotence is propped up by neotheories!

Pass by, anthill giants, drunk on your bourgeois brat personalities, smug in the good life you filched from your parents’ pantry, and your nerves all tied up by heredity!

Pass by, half-breeds, pass by, weaklings who proclaim only weakness; pass by, ultraweaklings who proclaim only might, bourgeois boys who shrink before the he-man at the fair and yet hope to create something out of your feverish indecision!

Pass by, epileptic dung-heap without grandeur, hysterical trash heap of plays and shows, social senility of the individual concept of youth!

Pass by, mildew of the New, merchandise that’s shabby before it leaves its inventor’s head!

Pass to the left of my Disdain as it turns right, all you creators of “philosophical systems,” you Bergsons, Boutroux, and Euckens, hospitals for the incurably religious, pragmatists of metaphysical journalism, charlatans of ponderous fabrications!

Pass by and don’t come back, you Paris provincials, Pan-European bourgeois, pariahs whose ambition is to look important!

Pass by, decigrams of Ambition, great only in an age that counts greatness by the milligram!

Pass by, you tawdry throwaways, lightning-lunch artists and politicians, high-riding servants of the Moment, postillions of Opportunity!

Pass by, “refined sensibilities” whose refinement is to have no backbone; pass by, constructors who frequent cafes and conferences, passing off piles of bricks as houses!

Pass by, you suburban intellects and street-corner emotionalists!

Pass by, finery that’s just tinsel, grandeur of the mediocre, triumphant megalomania of the villagers of Europeville! You who confuse the masses with humanity and grandees with nobility! You who confuse everything and who, when you’re thinking of nothing, always say something else! Chatterboxes, half-wits, dregs and scraps, pass by!

Pass by, would-be half-kings, sawdust rulers, feudal lords of the Castle of Cards!

Pass by, posthumous Romanticism of liberalists far and wide, Classicism of Racine’s fetuses in alcohol, dynamism of rinky-dink Whitmans, of beggars begging for a few cents of inspiration, of empty heads that make noise by banging against the walls!

Pass by, after-dinner hypnotists, masters of the woman next door, commanders who can’t command more than a few men in a barracks!

Pass by, self-satisfied traditionalists, truly sincere anarchists, socialists who invoke your worker status to get out of working! Habitues of revolution, pass by!

Pass by, eugenicists, organizers of a pinchbeck life, Prussians of applied biology, neo-Mendelians of our sociological ignorance.

Pass by, vegetarians, teetotalers, Calvinists who won’t bug off, killjoys of our dilapidated imperialism!

Pass by, scriveners of
vivre sa vie
at the grungiest corner bar, you Bernstein-Bataille Ibsenoids who play the strong man on stage.

Tango of savages, if at least you were a minuet!

Pass by definitively, pass by!

Come before my utter Loathing, you grand finale of fools, come grovel under the soles of my Disdain, you joke of a fire, a flickering flame crowning a tiny dunghill, dynamic synthesis of Today’s congenital inertia!

Grovel and crawl on your knees, you impotence that makes noise!

Grovel, you cannons that boom a total lack of any ambition beyond bullets, of any intelligence beyond bombs!

For this is the sordid equation of shotgun internationalism:

Proclaim loud and clear that nobody’s fighting for Freedom or Justice! They’re fighting in fear of everyone else! And their leaders are all of a few millimeters tall!

Warmongering gobbledygook! Hindenburg-Joffrean crap! European toilet of All The Same in puffed-up disagreement!

Who believes in them?

Who believes in their counterparts?

Make those
poilus
shave!

Take away the herd’s helmets!

Send everyone home to peel symbolic potatoes!

Give this mindless pandemonium a bath!

Couple this war to a locomotive!

Tie it to a leash and go show it in Australia!

Men, nations, objectives: all a huge zero!

All are to blame for the failure of everything!

The failure of everything is to blame for all them!

Completely, utterly, and unequivocally:

SHIT!

Europe is thirsty for Creativity! She’s hungry for the Future!

Europe longs for great Poets, great Statesmen, great Generals!

She wants the Politician who will consciously forge the unconscious destiny of her People!

She wants the Poet who ardently seeks Immortality and couldn’t care less about fame, which is for actresses and pharmaceuticals!

She wants the General who will fight for the Constructive Triumph, not for the victory that merely defeats others!

Europe wants many such Politicians, many such Poets, many such Generals!

Europe wants these Able Men to embody the Great Idea, the idea that’s the Name of her anonymous wealth!

Europe wants a New Intelligence to be the Form of her chaotic Matter!

She wants a New Will to raise an Edifice out of the random stones of contemporary Life!

She wants a New Sensibility to rally the self-serving egos of today’s lackeys!

Europe wants Masters! The World wants Europe!

Europe is sick of not existing! She’s sick of being the outskirts of herself! The Machine Age is searching, groping, for the advent of Glorious Humanity!

Europe yearns, at least, for Theoreticians of What-Will-Be, for Singer-Seers of her Future!

O scientific Destiny, give us Homers for the Machine Age! O Gods of Matter, give us Miltons for the Electrical Era!

Give us Self-Possessed Souls, Whole and Strong, Subtle and Harmonious!

Europe wants to go from being a geographical designation to a civilized person!

What we have now, eating away at Life, is just manure for the Future!

What we have now cannot endure, because it’s nothing!

I, from the Race of the Navigators, declare that it cannot endure!

I, from the Race of the Discoverers, disdain whatever’s less than the discovery of a New World!

Who in Europe has the slightest clue where the next New World will be discovered? Who knows how to set out from a modern-day Sagres?

I, at least, am a tremendous Yearning, the very same size as what’s Possible!

I, at least, stand as tall as Imperfect Ambition—imperfect but lordly, not the ambition of slaves!

I stand before the setting sun, and the shadow of my Contempt falls over you as night!

I, at least, am man enough to point the Way!

And I will point the Way!

ATTENTION!

I proclaim, in the first place,

The stimuli to sensibility increase in a geometric progression; sensibility itself increases only in an arithmetic progression
.

The importance of this law is obvious. Sensibility—used here in its widest sense—is the source of all civilized creativity. But creativity can fully flourish only when that sensibility is adapted to the milieu in which it operates. Creative output is great and strong to the extent that this adaptation occurs.

Sensibility, though it varies somewhat due to the pressures of its current milieu, is basically constant, being determined in a given individual from birth, in function of heredity and temperament. Sensibility, therefore, progresses
by generations
.

Civilization’s creations, which are what constitute our sensibility’s “milieu,” include culture, scientific progress, and changes in political conditions (in the broadest sense of the term). Now these creations—and most especially cultural and scientific progress, once it gets under way—do not result from the work of generations but from the combined and interactive work
of individuals
, and although this progress is slow at first, it soon reaches a point at which, from one generation to the next, there are hundreds of changes in these new stimuli to our sensibility. But sensibility itself, in the same period, takes only one small generational step, since the father passes on to the son only a fraction of his acquired qualities.

Hence civilization is bound to reach a point when the reigning sensibility is no longer adapted to the milieu that stimulates it, and so there’s a breakdown. This is what has happened in our present age, whose maladaptation is responsible for our incapacity to create anything great.

Our civilization was only slightly maladapted in the early phase of its history, from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century, when our
sensibility’s stimuli, largely cultural, progressed slowly and initially affected only the upper strata of society. The maladaptation increased during the second phase, from the French Revolution into the nineteenth century, when the stimuli, now largely political, progressed much more quickly and reached a far broader spectrum. In the phase running from the mid-nineteenth century to our own day, the maladaptation has increased vertiginously, for the major stimuli—the creations of science—have developed so rapidly that they far outstrip our modest gains in sensibility, and science’s practical applications reach every level of society. And so a huge gap has opened between our
sensibility’s stimuli
, whose progression has been geometric, and
sensibility itself
, which has obeyed an arithmetic progression.