Fernando Pessoa

In his pale, uninteresting face there was a look of suffering that didn’t add any interest, and it was difficult to say just what kind of suffering this look suggested. It seemed to suggest various kinds: hardships, anxieties, and the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having already suffered a lot.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry.

Let us absurdify life from east to west.

My dreams: since I create friends in my dreams, I walk with them. Their alien imperfection …

Lacking the ability to love, we grow weary, even before they are spoken, of the words we would have to say in order to be loved. Besides, which of us wants to be loved? Chateaubriand’s words “on le fatiguait en l’aimant” are not appropriate for us. The very idea of being loved wearies us to the point of alarm.

Life for us is whatever we imagine it to be. To the peasant with his one field, that field is everything, it is an empire. To Caesar with his vast empire which still feels cramped, that empire is a field. The poor man has an empire; the great man only a field. The truth is that we possess nothing but our own sensations; it is on them, then, and not on what they perceive, that we must base the reality of our life.

But all this is apropos of nothing

Ah, my love, the glory of works lost and never to be found, of treatises of which only the titles survive, of libraries that went up in flames, of broken statues.

possible that you were smiling; to yourself, to your soul, picturing yourself in your own mind and smiling. But your lips were as calm as the shape of the hills; and the gesture of your rustic hands, which I forget, was garlanded with flowers of the field

It is in that brief glimpse of your anonymous figure that I place all the evocative power of the fields, and when I think of you, all the calm I’ve never felt fills my soul.

is in that brief glimpse of your anonymous figure that I place all the evocative power of the fields, and when I think of you, all the calm I’ve never felt fills my soul. Your gait had a slight sway to it, a hesitant roll, your every gesture was like a bird alighting; invisible creepers wound around your body