fernando-pessoa-1
Fernando Pessoa, born Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa ( June 13, 1888 – November 30, 1935), was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language. He also wrote in and translated from English and French
To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming — like worms when a rock is lifted — under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 10:02 PM UTC
There are ships sailing to many ports,
but not a single one goes to where life is not painful;
nor is there a port of call where it is possible to forget.
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 10:00 PM UTC
Today, suddenly, I reached an absurd but unerring conclusion. In a moment of enlightenment, I realized that I'm nobody, absolutely nobody. When the lightning flashed, I saw that what I had thought to be a city was in fact a deserted plain and, in the same sinister light that revealed me to myself, there seemed to be no sky above it. I was robbed of any possibility of having existed before the world. If I was ever reincarnated, I must have done so without myself, without a self to reincarnate.
I am the outskirts of some non-existent town, the long-winded prologue to an unwritten book. I'm nobody, nobody. I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me.
I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite, infinitous space, in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool.
And I, I myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one. I, I myself, am the well in which the walls have fallen away to leave only viscous slime. I am the centre of everything surrounded by the great nothing.
And it is as if hell itself were laughing within me but, instead of the human touch of diabolical laughter, there's the mad croak of the dead universe, the circling cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds drifting blackly in the wind, misshapen, anachronistic, without the God who created it, without God himself who spins in the dark of darks, impossible, unique, everything.
If only I could think! If only I could feel!
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 9:58 PM UTC
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 by 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 we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 9:53 PM UTC
Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives,
or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter.
Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is,
how alien the will,
and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort,
and no more our own than the will.
Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things,
but a life the wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things,
since it cannot obtain everything,
and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 9:51 PM UTC
I am the escaped one,
After I was born
They locked me up inside me
But I left.
My soul seeks me,
Through hills and valley,
I hope my soul
never finds me
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 9:46 PM UTC
But my sadness is comforting
Because it’s right and natural
And because it’s what the soul should feel
When it already thinks it exists
And the hand pick flowers
And the soul takes no notice.”
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 9:42 PM UTC
I know, I alone
How much it hurts, this heart
With no faith nor law
Nor melody nor thought.
Only I, only I
And none of this can I say
Because feeling is like the sky -
Seen, nothing in it to see.
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 9:40 PM UTC
There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and women. There are phrases from literary works that have a positively human personality. There are passages from my own writing that chill me with fright, so distinctly do I feel them as people, so sharply outlined do they appear against the walls of my room, at night, in shadows….. I've written sentences whose sound, read out loud or silently (impossible to hide their sound), can only be of something that acquired absolute exteriority and a full-fledged soul
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 9:38 PM UTC
I am nothing.
I'll never be anything.
I couldn't want to be something.
Apart from that,
I have in me all the dreams in the world.
Oct 20, 2013
Oct 20, 2013 at 9:35 PM UTC