Nunca amamos niguém. Amamos, tão-somente, a ideia que fazemos de alguém. É a um conceito nosso — em suma, é a nós mesmos — que amamos.
(We never love someone. We just love the idea we have of someone. It’s a concept of ours - summing up, ourselves - that we love.)
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
A solidão desola-me; a companhia oprime-me.
(Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.)
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Considero a vida uma estalagem onde tenho que me demorar até que chegue a diligência do abismo. Não sei onde ela me levará, porque não sei nada.
(I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don’t know where it will take me, for I know nothing.)
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
Contact with life is ever more painful for the soul, and all efforts are ever more arduous, because the outer conditions for making an effort are forever more odious.
I’m something that I used to be. I’m never where I feel I am, and if I seek myself, I don’t know who’s seeking me. My boredom with everything has numbed me. I feel banished from my soul.
Inside the chicken coop from whence he will go to be killed, the cock sings hymns to freedom because they gave him two perches all to himself.
Fernando Pessoa, ‘The Book of Disquiet’ (139)
Today I suddenly experienced an absurd but quiet valid sensation. I realized, in an intimate lightning flash, that I am no one. No one, absolutely no one.
Man shouldn’t be able to see his own face — there’s nothing more sinister. Nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes. Only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. And the very posture he had to assume was symbolic. He had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself. The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.
Fernando Pessoa, 466, The Book of Disquiet (via h-a-s-s-a-a-n)
This reminds me of that Borges quote about mirrors being abominable, but not because of the vanity that comes when a human no longer has to prostrate to be able to see herself, but because of doubling and multiplying images in the world.
(via metonymia)
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 it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life.
I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write…I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me—blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well—my own face that observes me observing it.
Fernando Pessoa, ‘Text 193’, dated 2 September 1931, from
The Book of Disquiet. (via
scorpionatmidnight)
