The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (41 page)

9.

Ah, I understand! Vasques my boss is Life—monotonous and necessary, imperious and inscrutable Life. This banal man represents the banality of Life. For me he is everything, externally speaking, because for me Life is whatever is external.

And if the office on the Rua dos Douradores represents life for me, the fifth-floor room where I live, on this same Rua dos Douradores, represents Art for me. Yes, Art, residing on the very same street as Life, but in a different place. Art, which gives me relief from life without relieving me of living, being as monotonous as life itself, only in a different place. Yes, for me the Rua dos Douradores contains the meaning of everything and the answer to all riddles, except for the riddle of why riddles exist, which can never be answered.

12.

I envy—but I’m not sure that I envy—those for whom a biography could be written, or who could write their own. In these random impressions, and with no desire to be other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I say nothing, it’s because I have nothing to say.

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. I make landscapes out of what I feel. I make holidays of my sensations. I can easily understand women who embroider out of sorrow or who crochet because life exists. My elderly aunt would play solitaire throughout the endless evening. These confessions of what I feel are my solitaire. I don’t interpret them like those who read cards to tell the future. I don’t probe them, because in solitaire the cards don’t have any special significance. I unwind myself like a multicolored skein, or I make string figures of myself, like those woven on spread fingers and passed from child to child. I take care only
that my thumb not miss its loop. Then I turn over my hand and the figure changes. And I start over.

To live is to crochet according to a pattern we were given. But while doing it the mind is at liberty, and all enchanted princes can stroll in their parks between one and another plunge of the hooked ivory needle. Needlework of things.... Intervals.... Nothing....

Besides, what can I expect from myself? My sensations in all their horrible acuity, and a profound awareness of feeling. ... A sharp mind that only destroys me, and an unusual capacity for dreaming to keep me entertained. ... A dead will and a reflection that cradles it, like a living child.... Yes, crochet....

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. When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer speak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like an image in a mirror.

The mere thought of having to enter into contact with someone else makes me nervous. A simple invitation to have dinner with a friend produces an anguish in me that’s hard to define. The idea of any social obligation whatsoever—attending a funeral, dealing with someone about an office matter, going to the station to wait for someone I know or don’t know—the very idea disturbs my thoughts for an entire day, and sometimes I even start worrying the night before, so that I sleep badly. When it takes place, the dreaded encounter is utterly in
significant, justifying none of my anxiety, but the next time is no different: I never learn to learn.

“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.

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 thought.

It’s curious that what little capacity I have for enthusiasm is aroused by those most unlike me in temperament. I admire no one in literature more than the classical writers, who are the ones I least resemble. Forced to choose between reading only Chateaubriand or Vieira,* I would choose Vieira without a moment’s hesitation.

The more a man differs from me, the more real he seems, for he depends that much less on my subjectivity. And that’s why the object of my close and constant study is the same common humanity that I loathe and stay away from. I love it because I hate it. I like to look at it because I hate to feel it. The landscape, admirable as a picture, rarely makes a comfortable bed.

79.

Faint, like something just beginning, the low-tide smell wafted over the Tagus and putridly spread over the streets near the shore. The stench was crisply nauseating, with a cold torpor of lukewarm sea. I felt life in my stomach, and my sense of smell shifted to behind my eyes. Tall, sparse bundles of clouds alighted on nothing, their grayness disintegrating into a pseudo-white. A cowardly sky threatened the atmosphere, as if with inaudible thunder, made only of air.

There was even stagnation in the flight of the gulls; they seemed to be lighter than air, left there by someone. Nothing oppressed. The late afternoon disquiet was my own; a cool breeze intermittently blew.

My ill-starred hopes, born of the life I’ve been forced to live! They’re like this hour and this air, fogless fogs, unraveled basting of a false storm. I feel like screaming, to put an end to this landscape and my meditation. But the stench of ocean imbues my intent, and the low tide inside me has exposed the sludgy blackness that’s somewhere out there, though I can see it only by its smell.

All this stupid insistence on being self-sufficient! All this cynical awareness of pretended sensations! All this imbroglio of my soul with these sensations, of my thoughts with the air and the river—all just to say that life smells bad and hurts me in my consciousness. 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!”

87.

Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity. If we knew the truth, we’d see it; everything else is systems and approximations. The inscrutability of the universe is quite enough for us to think about; to want to actually understand it is to be less than human, since to be human is to realize it can’t be understood.

I’m handed faith like a sealed package on a strange-looking platter and am expected to accept it without opening it. I’m handed science, like a knife on a plate, to cut the folios of a book whose pages are blank. I’m handed doubt, like dust inside a box—but why give me a box if all it contains is dust?

I write because I don’t know, and I use whatever abstract and lofty term for Truth a given emotion requires. If the emotion is clear and decisive, then I naturally speak of the gods, thereby framing it in a consciousness of the world’s multiplicity. If the emotion is profound, then I naturally speak of God, thereby placing it in a unified consciousness. If the emotion is a thought, I naturally speak of Fate, thereby shoving it up against the wall.

Sometimes the mere rhythm of a sentence will require God instead of the Gods; at other times the two syllables of “the Gods” will be necessary, and I’ll verbally change universe; on still other occasions what will matter is an internal rhyme, a metrical displacement, or a burst of emotion, and polytheism or monotheism will prevail accordingly. The Gods are contingent on style.

101.

If our life were an eternal standing by the window, if we could remain there forever, like hovering smoke, with the same moment of twilight forever paining the curve of the hills.... If we could remain that way for beyond forever! If at least on this side of the impossible we could thus continue, without committing an action, without our pallid lips sinning another word!

Look how it’s getting dark!... The positive quietude of everything fills me with rage, with something that’s a bitterness in the air I breathe. My soul aches.... A slow wisp of smoke rises and dissipates in the distance.... A restless tedium makes me think no more of you....

All so superfluous! We and the world and the mystery of both.

112.

We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept—our own selves—that we love.

This is true in the whole gamut of love. In sexual love we seek our own pleasure via another body. In non-sexual love, we seek our own pleasure via our own idea. The masturbator may be abject, but in point of fact he’s the perfect logical expression of the lover. He’s the only one who doesn’t feign and doesn’t fool himself.

The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say “I love you” or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different color or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul’s activity.

Today I’m lucid as if I didn’t exist. My thinking is as naked as a skeleton, without the fleshly tatters of the illusion of expression. And these considerations that I forge and abandon weren’t born from anything—at least not from anything in the front rows of my consciousness. Perhaps it was the sales representative’s disillusion with his girlfriend, perhaps a sentence I read in one of the romantic tales that our newspapers reprint from the foreign press, or perhaps just a vague nausea for which I can think of no physical cause....

The scholiast who annotated Virgil was wrong. Understanding is what wearies us most of all. To live is to not think.

113.

Two or three days like the beginning of love....

The value of this for the aesthete is in the feelings it produces. To go further would be to enter the realm of jealousy, suffering, and anxiety. In this antechamber of emotion there’s all the sweetness of love—hints of pleasure, whiffs of passion—without any of its depth. If this means giving up the grandeur of tragic love, we must remember that tragedies, for the aesthete, are interesting to observe but unpleasant to experience. The cultivation of life hinders that of the imagination. It is the aloof, uncommon man who rules.

No doubt this theory would satisfy me, if I could convince myself that it’s not what it is: a complicated jabber to fill the ears of my intelligence, to make it almost forget that at heart I’m just timid, with no aptitude for life.

128.

I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

Nothing would bother me more than if they found me strange at the office. I like to revel in the irony that they don’t find me at all strange. I like the hair shirt of being regarded by them as their equal. I like the crucifixion of being considered no different. There are martyrdoms
more subtle than those recorded for the saints and hermits. There are torments of our mental awareness as there are of the body and of desire. And in the former, as in the latter, there’s a certain sensuality ….

150.

The persistence of instinctive life in the guise of human intelligence is one of my most constant and profound contemplations. The artificial disguise of consciousness only highlights for me the unconsciousness it doesn’t succeed in disguising.

From birth to death, man is the slave of the same external dimension that rules animals. Throughout his life he doesn’t live, he vegetatively thrives, with greater intensity and complexity than an animal. He’s guided by norms without knowing that they guide him or even that they exist, and all his ideas, feelings, and acts are unconscious—not because there’s no consciousness in them but because there aren’t two consciousnesses.

Flashes of awareness that we live an illusion—that, and no more, is what distinguishes the greatest of men.

With a wandering mind I consider the common history of common men. I see how in everything they are slaves of a subconscious temperament, of extraneous circumstances, and of the social and antisocial impulses in which, with which, and over which they clash like petty objects.

How often I’ve heard people say the same old phrase that symbolizes all the absurdity, all the nothingness, all the verbalized ignorance of their lives. It’s the phrase they use in reference to any material pleasure: “This is what we take away from life....” Take where? take how? take why? It would be sad to wake them out of their darkness with questions like that.... Only a materialist can utter such a phrase, because everyone who utters such a phrase is, whether he knows it or not, a materialist. What does he plan to take from life, and how? Where will he take his pork chops and red wine and lady friend? To what heaven that he doesn’t believe in? To what earth, where he’ll only take the rottenness that was the latent essence of his whole life? I can think of no phrase that’s more tragic, or that reveals more about human humanity.
That’s what plants would say if they could know that they enjoy the sun. That’s what animals would say about their somnambulant pleasures, were their power of self-expression not inferior to man’s. And perhaps even I, while writing these words with a vague impression that they might endure, imagine that my memory of having written them is what I “take away from life.” And just as a common corpse is lowered into the common ground, so the equally useless corpse of the prose I wrote while waiting will be lowered into common oblivion. A man’s pork chops, his wine, his lady friend—who am I to make fun of them?