I Ni al hablar o escribir, ni en la mirada Whether we write or speak or do but look nos mostramos jamás: nuestra conciencia We are ever unapparent. WhatI Ni al hablar o escribir, ni en la mirada Whether we write or speak or do but look nos mostramos jamás: nuestra conciencia We are ever unapparent. What we are ni en voz ni en libro puede ser cifrada. Cannot be transfused into word or book. Revelamos tan sólo una apariencia. Our soul from us is infinitely far.
Por más que el pensamiento pueda verse However much we give our thoughts the will tras el espejo que del alma aflora, To be our soul and gesture it abroad, el corazón no llega a conocerse. Our hearts are incommunicable still. En lo que se revela, se lo ignora. In what we show ourselves we are ignored.
Existe entre las almas un abismo The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged que no logra salvar el pensamiento, By any skill of thought or trick of seeming. y nos separa—dentro de nosotros— Unto our very selves we are abridged
de nuestro ser el pensamiento mismo. When we would utter to our thought our being. Somos sueños del propio entendimiento, We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams, y sueños de otros sueños de los otros. And each to each other dreams of others' dreams.
Absorto e incierto y sin conocer, floto en el mar muerto de mi propio ser
Me siento pesar porque agua me siento... Te veo oscilar, vida-descontento...
De vela
Absorto e incierto y sin conocer, floto en el mar muerto de mi propio ser
Me siento pesar porque agua me siento... Te veo oscilar, vida-descontento...
De velas privado... La quilla virada... El cielo estrellado frío como espada.
Soy cielo y soy viento... Soy barco y soy mar... Que no soy yo siento... Lo quiero ignorar.
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Pessoa en español. Y yo en español. Una lectura distinta (intento con todas mis fuerzas dejar de lado el abuso de puntos suspensivos).
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Cuando era joven, yo a mí me decía: ¡Cómo pasan los días, día a día, sin nada conseguido o intentado! Mas, viejo, digo, con el mismo enfado: ¡Cómo, día tras día, todos son sin nada hecho y sin nada en la intención! Así, naturalmente, envejecido, diré con igual voz e igual sentido: diré ya nada. Quien nada fue ni es no dirá nada.
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Versos así te atraviesan.
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...solo en la ilusión de libertad la libertad existe.
Thinking is a discomfort, like walking in the rain When the wind kicks up and it seems to rain harder.
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Pensar incomoda como andar à chuva Quando o vento
Thinking is a discomfort, like walking in the rain When the wind kicks up and it seems to rain harder.
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Pensar incomoda como andar à chuva Quando o vento cresce e parece que chove mais. —Alberto Caeiro
It has been said that people don’t change, things do. In the world according to Pessoa, there were no certainties. Everything was as if. It was not just to have fun with us, or with literature, that he divided himself into alter egos – including several dozen lesser heteronyms who wrote poetry and prose in Portuguese, English and even French; it was because the notion of a coherent, solid-state I struck him as an illusion. No one is today what he or she was yesterday. We are in permanent flux. Thoughts change feelings, feelings change thoughts.
My dear friend, he said, life is strange and strange things happen in life
I went to bed, it was almost midnight. Three hours later, I was up drinking My dear friend, he said, life is strange and strange things happen in life
I went to bed, it was almost midnight. Three hours later, I was up drinking water and holding a book which I’ve been reading for a few days now and I’m almost finishing, filled with paragraphs that suffocate the reader due to a lack of white spaces, recipes and places that make Portugal proud, rather mundane observations interspersed with the extraordinary, dialogues that disguise themselves on purpose, and underscore the tone of a stream of consciousness but not quite—it’s a hallucination, why would I expect order?, I asked. As I was holding the book, I knew I would write something about it as soon as I finish it; I kept listening to that voice anticipating things to say. It’s instinct; the way I see it, it isn’t born in one’s mind but in one’s gut. I can’t analyze inspiration; it comes—while turning the pages or two months later—I sit and I write. But I’m not a writer. They write for readers; I write to clear the mind and unclog the heart. I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, it must be all those thoughts and responsibilities heavier than mountains, I assumed, that have prevented me from having a good night’s sleep since April. So I started reading the book I was holding, trying to find some sort of reassurance. Whereas many people seek entertainment, and I’d like to be a member of that group more often, I added, I was looking for solace; I was trying to reclaim a lost sanctuary. Everything causes cancer, even being unhappy, told me the Ticket Collector the night before. One should always be careful, I replied, once unhappiness poisons the heart, all sorts of ailments and diseases appear, medieval and new. Books usually provide balm for troubled souls. However, do I have a soul? There’s trouble, no doubt, but perhaps I caught the Writer’s virus and I don’t have a soul anymore, we all know how contagious those things can be and I may have an Unconscious now. It would explain why I’m here, talking nonsense, addressing the Silence, fearing ghosts as the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve quietly. It would explain many things. I’d better get back to the book, I said, before the night is over and the day demands the fulfillment of all duties. Besides, this is not a good time to be discussing viruses. This is a bewitched year, I remember the Writer saying once, there is some kind of witchcraft going on.
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It was a beautiful night, I could almost hear a melody from a nocturne by Chopin being played not far from here. I’m not the only one experiencing difficulties to sleep, I thought. I returned to the book and suddenly, the Seller of Stories was offering his services again. He insisted on telling me a story, any story. There’s a full moon, he said as he sat on the other side of the bed, and that’s the moon of poets, you’re alone and your soul is filled with longing, and a story might bring you some happiness. A melancholy tone swathed his words; a tone I’ve recognized in every person who carries the burden of their past—everything they failed to be. I listened to what he had to tell. Nevertheless, I had a feeling he kept to himself the most interesting story. A most disquieting one. A quality all literature should possess, according to the Guest I had the pleasure to meet earlier. Well, I haven’t met him per se, I witnessed his meeting with the Writer. I shouldn’t pay much attention to everything the Guest has written, though, since he spent many years hiding behind detached thoughts only to acknowledge, after his death, when most people can’t have an appointment with him and have no more than what has been printed to rely on, that the important thing is to feel. In that same meeting, the Guest said he distrusts literature that soothes people’s consciences, while some people, I responded to myself, turn to books to soothe their consciences, to populate their solitude, to find some answers, to learn how to choose according to the dictates of the heart, that is, to make visceral choices—always the best ones, observed the Writer. Nothing wrong with living in the world of dreams, I thought, as long as that world only belongs to the Night; in order to do any of those things, and for them to have repercussions on our lives, one has to be awake.
I’m all of these things, like it or not, in the confused depths of my fatal sensibility.
Sou todas essa coisas, em
Review found in a drawer.
I’m all of these things, like it or not, in the confused depths of my fatal sensibility.
Sou todas essa coisas, embora o não queira, no fundo confuso da minha sensibilidade fatal. ― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet/Livro do Desassossego.
The Education of the Stoic is the only legacy of the Baron of Teive, a manuscript with which he took the mirror of abstractions and reflected himself to explain why he wasn’t able to produce superior art, to write the books he wanted to. Explanations to illustrate the unutterable. The commonplace vacuum that feels unique.
I had scruples where other men didn’t think twice, and after seeing what I didn’t do done by others, I wondered: Why did I think so much if it only made me suffer?
All the factors that lead to look at such tragedy in the eye and accept it unreservedly; dealing, with pride, with the rejection of life itself. Acknowledging the parcial defeat of reason in the sphere of emotions, as he, amid a plethora of contradictions, refuses to be like just anybody, while being like just anybody.
But powerful as thought is, it can do nothing to quell rebellious emotions. We can’t choose not to feel, as we can not to walk.
The aristocrat and the assistant bookkeeper. Bernardo Soares’ presence palpitates with silent vehemence all around this book. His thoughts intermingle with the Baron’s musings and disclose the similarities of two individuals of different backgrounds, equally unfit to live life. The ode to brevity. Or the impossibility of writing an elaborated chapter.
Sometimes it is only one sentence. And by the end of it, everything trembles.
Do with the brutality that doing entails; renounce with the absoluteness of renunciation.
Everyone is renouncing. And the reader sees them vanishing. A surge of innocuous unawareness leaving behind a wounded path. Things become real once lost. Things are lost unbeknownst to them. They have written on selfish air; the reader, on self-centered stone.
The Baron’s collection of thoughts and rejections to theories that reduce truth to simplicity, of regrets and a proud denial of ever having regrets, of silent competitions and unachievable art, of voices unheard and impracticable faith - this is his testament. A manuscript on how the idea of perfection eclipsed the author’s life, on the indignity of weeping before the world and other similar banalities. An analysis on the fatal nature of lucidity. Inconclusive, unconnected fragments to justify “the profession of nonproducer.”
These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition.
Pessoa, Tabucci and Zenith constitute the Appendix. Among the texts, there is an act of giving voice to the regular human nature that literary work set aside at times. Conclusions about the days that belong only to the writer. To the greatest novelist without a novel.
The weight of life overpowers everything, and at the threshold of annihilation, the Baron of Teive admits he has been conquered, and makes himself a conqueror. A raw complaint to a stoic succession of nothingness in the midst of ephemeral hope, as identities juxtapose, merge, and evanesce. Easy, kiddo, no one will notice the voiceless outburst.
I, the solemn researcher of futile things, Who could go and live in Siberia just to get bored of it And who thinks it's fine not to feel too attached toI, the solemn researcher of futile things, Who could go and live in Siberia just to get bored of it And who thinks it's fine not to feel too attached to his homeland, For I don't have roots, I'm not a tree, and so I have no roots... I, who often feel as real as a metaphor,
I, the inborn unhappiness of all expressions. The impossibility of expressing all feelings,
And what seems to mean nothing always means something...
* Rereading Álvaro de Campos: another favorite now. My sort of least favorite from this collection so far is Reis. Aug 21, 17...more
With such a lack of people with whom to coexist, as there is today, what can a man of sensitivity do, but invent his friends, or at least, his compani
With such a lack of people with whom to coexist, as there is today, what can a man of sensitivity do, but invent his friends, or at least, his companions in spirit?
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Com uma tal falta de gente coexistível, como há hoje, que pode um homem de sensibilidade fazer senão inventar os seus amigos, ou quando menos, os seus companheiros de espírito?
—Fernando Pessoa, Obras de António Mora. Edição Crítica das Obras de Fernando Pessoa
Ode to dreams and coffee
On the night of the twenty-second of February in 2021, the Reviewer, reader and nothing else, had a dream. She dreamed it was a torrid summer day and that she was at a café. The café, one of the oldest in the city, was replete with distinguished people who made the Reviewer felt rather intimidated. She was reading a book and having a strong espresso to face the day. She relied on that daily cup to start the morning almost too much. That caffeine kick that gets you through each day—some people can’t even do that.
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In one corner, she thought she saw Daedalus, architect and aviator, speaking about a dream he had thousand of years ago, at a time impossible to calculate exactly. He was talking about it with Cecco Angioliere, poet and blasphemer, who, living up to his reputation, was bitterly taking big sips of Turkish coffee since he couldn’t wait for his turn to speak about the dream he had one night in January 1309.
Sitting behind the Reviewer was François Villon, poet and malefactor, discussing a dream he had on Christmas dawn in 1451, accompanied by his compatriot Arthur Rimbaud, poet and vagabond. The sense of kinship between them was instantaneous. They were both having Irish coffee and kept chatting about their otherworldly visions for hours.
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As the Reviewer was trying to get the waiter’s attention to pay the bill, she spotted François Rabelais, writer and former friar, walking out of the kitchen. He was holding a cup of pitch-black coffee and talking with one of the cooks about a dream he had one night in February 1532, featuring two perpetually famished giants.
On a table by the window, the Reviewer saw Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and opium-eater, enjoying a caffè mocha with Claude-Achille Debussy, musician and aesthete, who was having an oxymoron—decaf coffee—and, for some reason, kept tapping his right foot on the black-and-white checkerboard floor. It looked like a most interesting reunion so the Reviewer started to read their lips, her area of expertise. Samuel Taylor Coleridge began talking about a dream he had one night in November 1801. His use of language, so elegant and evocative, captivated Debussy completely. So much so, that he barely discussed the dream he had the night of June 29, 1893, thinking that being aroused by fauns and nymphs wasn’t aesthetically pleasing and that if Sigmund Freud—interpreter of other people’s dreams, who was seated at an adjacent table—listened to him, the session would be beyond all bearing.
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The list went on and on. So many personalities who had excelled at various disciplines. So much talent, charm, good fortune and tragedy. Several centuries combined in one single afternoon. By sunset, the waiters announced the café was closing, so they gently invited the clients to leave their sits and come back tomorrow. The Reviewer left the building and sat on a bench across the street. She discerned a shadow approaching one of the windows. Despite the dim light, she caught a glimpse of a man closing the curtains.
Well then, said Caeiro, when you were awakened during the night by an unknown master who was dictating his poems, speaking to you about the soul, you should know, then, that I was that master. It was I who put myself in contact with you from the Beyond. I guessed as much, said Pessoa, my beloved Master, I guessed it was you. But I must beg your pardon for having brought you so much insomnia, said Caeiro, night after night in which you didn’t sleep and wrote as if in a trance. I regret having caused you so much trouble, for inhabiting your soul. You contributed to my work, answered Pessoa, you guided my hand. You brought me insomnia, it’s true, but those were fertile nights for me, and my literary work was born in the night. My work is nocturnal work. (November 28, 1935)
It was Fernando Pessoa, poet and pretender, who didn’t talk about the dream he had on the night of March 7, 1914, since he could no longer share his dreams with his only love, Ophélia—neglected, wounded Ophélia. A victim of art. The fall of the idols. Yes, Fernando Pessoa, the one who would have his last three days on Earth unraveled by another writer—someone who knew the world of dreams and hallucinations like the palm of his hand. Palm-of-the-hand dreams.
After a typical 5-hour sleep period, the Reviewer woke up and noticed the smell of freshly brewed coffee.
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