The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (24 page)

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Only now can we fully understand what Voltaire meant when he said that, if there’s life on other planets, then the earth is the Universe’s insane asylum. We are indeed an insane asylum, whether or not the other planets are inhabited. Our life has lost all sense of what’s normal, and where there’s health, it’s just a remission of our illness.

Our life is a chronic illness, a feverish anemia. Our fate is that of not dying, so well have we adapted to our perpetually moribund condition.

What relationship can an age like this one have with a spiritual heir to the race of constructors, with a soul inspired by paganism’s glorious truths? None, except one of instinctive rejection and automatic scorn. We, the only dissenters from decadence, are thus forced to assume an attitude that, by its nature, is likewise decadent. An attitude of indifference is a decadent attitude, and our inability to adapt to the current milieu forces us to just such an attitude. We don’t adapt, because healthy people cannot adapt to a sick milieu, and since we don’t adapt, it is we who are sick. This is the paradox in which those of us who are pagans live. We have no hope and no cure.

I accept that this must be our attitude, but I don’t accept Ricardo Reis’s way of accepting it. Yes, we should be indifferent toward an age that wants nothing to do with us and about which we can do nothing. But we should not celebrate this indifference as if it were a good thing in itself, which is what Ricardo Reis does. In this respect Reis, far from being unaffected by the trends of this age, clearly embodies one of
them—the decadent trend. His indifference is already an adaptation to the current milieu. It is already a concession.

We are not really neopagans, or new pagans. Neopagan, or new pagan, is a nonsensical term. Paganism is the one religion that springs directly from nature, that’s born from the earth, from attributing to each object its true reality. Being quintessentially natural, it can appear and disappear, but not change in quality. The term “neopagan” makes no more sense than “neorock” or “neoflower.” Paganism appears when the human species is healthy, and disappears when it is sick. It can wither, as a flower withers, and die, as a plant dies. But it cannot assume a different form, nor does it have more than one basic form.

That rebellious Christians such as Pater and Swinburne called themselves neopagans when there was nothing pagan about them except the desire to be pagan is excusable, since there’s a certain logic in applying an impossible name to an absurdity. But we, who are pagans, cannot use a name that suggests that we are somehow “modern” about it, or that we came to “reform” or “reconstruct” the paganism of the Greeks. We came to be pagans. Paganism was reborn in us. But the paganism that was reborn in us is the same paganism there always was: submission to the gods, and justice on Earth for its own sake.

A scholar of paganism is not a pagan. And a pagan is not a humanist: he’s human. What a pagan most appreciates in Christism is the common people’s faith in miracles and saints, rituals and celebrations. It is the “rejected” part of Christism that he would most readily accept, if he would accept anything Christian. Any “modern paganism” or “neopaganism” that can understand the mystic poets but not the feast days of saints has nothing in common with paganism, because the pagan willingly admits a religious procession but turns his back on the mysticism of St. Theresa of Ávila. The Christian interpretation of the world disgusts him, but a celebration at church with candles, flowers, songs, and then a festival—he sees these as good things, even if they’re part of something bad, for these things are truly human, and are the pagan interpretation of Christianity.

The pagan sympathizes with Christian superstition, because the man who isn’t superstitious isn’t a man, but he feels no sympathy for humanitarianism, since the humanitarian isn’t human.

For the pagan each thing has its nymph, or genius. Each thing is a captive nymph, or a dryad caught by our gaze; that’s why everything, for him, has an astonishing immediate reality, and he feels fellowship with each thing when he sees it, and friendship when he touches it.

The man who sees in each object some other object than what’s there cannot see, love, or feel that object. Whoever values something because it was created by “God” values it not for what it is but for what it recalls. His eyes behold the object, but his thoughts lie elsewhere.

The pantheist, who values each object for its participation in the
whole
, likewise sees one thing in order to think about another, likewise looks in order not to see. He doesn’t think of the object, but of its continuity with the rest of the world. How can a thing be loved by someone who loves it because of a principle that’s outside it? The first and last rule of love is that the beloved object should be loved for what it is and not for something else, loved for being the object of love and not because there’s a “reason” to love it.

The pure materialist or rationalist, for whom each thing is marvelous because of the work “Nature” put into it and because of its latent, throbbing energy, the planetary system that’s in each of its atoms and that makes it live—this man likewise does not love or see the thing, he likewise looks at one thing while thinking of something else, namely its composition. When he beholds an object, he meditates on its decomposition. That is why no materialist ever made art; no materialist or rationalist ever looked at the world. Between him and the world the mysticism of science dropped its veil, the microscope, and he tripped in reality as if into a deep well. For him each thing, instead of being appreciated as a person of earth, is a screen through which he atomistically peers, just as for the pantheist it is a screen or window for perceiving the Whole, and for the creationist a screen through which to see God. When the contemplation is intense, the screen is forgotten. Who cares about the window through which he intently looked? For mystical Christians, for pantheistic dreamers, for materialists and
men of “reason,” the world is merely their thoughts. The Christian error of substituting man for nature is the disease that has made all of them decrepit from birth.

Ricardo Reis, like fellow heteronym Álvaro de Campos, was an avid writer of prose as well as of poetry, and one of his favorite prose pursuits was to find fault with his colleague. This was not hard to do, since the two were temperamental opposites. Classically minded Reis took Campos to task for being formally undisciplined in his poetry, and sensation-driven Campos counterattacked by saying that Reis hid his true self, including his sexuality (which was either bi or homo), behind his complex syntax. The one thing they agreed on was the sublime genius of Alberto Caeiro, for whom Campos wrote his anecdotal
Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro,
while Reis—in a more theoretical and analytical mode—wrote a monumental, though fragmentary, preface to Caeiro
’s
poetry. Besides eulogizing Caeiro and critically appraising his work, Reis’s preface expounds on the principles of paganism and makes an ardent appeal for its modern-day reconstruction. The four fragments that follow are concerned almost entirely with this latter aspect, though they keep referring to Caeiro, who was for Reis—as for Antonio Mora—the perfect embodiment of paganism
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The work of Caeiro represents the total reconstruction of paganism in its absolute essence, such as could never have been achieved even by the Greeks or Romans, who lived under paganism and hence didn’t think about it. But his work and his paganism were not thought out, nor were they felt: they came from that part of us that runs even deeper than feeling or reason. To say more would be to enter into useless explanations;
to affirm less would be to lie. Every work speaks for itself, with its own particular voice and in that language by which it mentally took shape; whoever doesn’t understand cannot understand, and to explain it to him is like enunciating words to try to make someone understand a language he doesn’t speak.

With no knowledge of life, scant knowledge of literature, and virtually no culture or human fellowship, Caeiro produced his work by way of a deep and imperceptible progression, like the one that guides the logical development of civilizations, via the unconscious consciousness of humans. It was a progression in his feelings, or in the way he felt his feelings, and an evolution in the thoughts born out of those progressive feelings. Through a superhuman intuition, resembling those on which new religions are founded for eternity but without being religious itself, since it rejects all religions and all metaphysics for the simple reason that they reject the sun and the rain, this man discovered the world without thinking about it, and created a concept of the universe that doesn’t consist of an interpretation.

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When I once had occasion, almost four years ago in Lisbon, to show Alberto Caeiro what principles his work naturally led to, he denied that it led to those principles. For Caeiro, as an absolute objectivist, even the pagan gods were a deformation of paganism. In his abstract objectivism there was no place for the gods. He understood all too well that they were made in the image and likeness of material things, and for him that was enough to make them worthless.

I see things in a different light. The Greek gods represent the abstract conceptualization of materializing objectivism. We cannot live without abstract ideas, since without them we cannot think, but whatever reality we attribute to those ideas should have its origin in the same matter from where we extracted them. So it is with the gods. Although abstract ideas have no true reality, they do have a human reality, valid only in the place that the human species occupies in the world. The
gods belong to the category of abstractions by virtue of their relationship to reality, but they do not belong to that category as pure abstractions, because they aren’t pure abstractions. Just as abstract ideas help us to live among things, the gods help us to live among men. The gods are thus real and unreal at the same time. They are unreal because they aren’t realities, but they are real as materialized abstractions. A materialized abstraction becomes pragmatically real; an unmaterialized abstraction isn’t even real in this limited sense. Plato, when he made ideas into abstract persons, followed the old pagan process for creating gods, but he placed his gods too far out of reach. An idea becomes a God only when it is brought back to materiality. It then becomes a force of Nature. That’s what a God is. Whether that’s a reality, I don’t know. Personally I believe in the existence of the gods; I believe in their infinite number and in the possibility of man ascending to god......

The creator of civilization is a force of Nature and therefore a god, or a demigod.

Alberto Caeiro is more pagan than paganism, for he is more conscious of paganism in its essence than any other pagan writer. How can a pagan be a pagan, if he conceives his mental and spiritual attitude in opposition to a different system of sensibility, such as Christianity? And when the conflict broke out between paganism and Christianity, with the latter winning out, the torpid and decadent mentality of the Roman people was already basically Christian and not pagan at all. We can see this in Julian’s attempt to react against Christianity. This emperor sincerely wanted to reestablish paganism, at a time when its spirit—alas for Julian!—no longer existed, and the cult of the gods that survived was marked by a superstitiousness more typical of Christism than of any species of paganism. Julian’s very ideas confirm the impossibility of reconstructing paganism in that day and age. Julian was a Mithraist,* which nowadays would make him a theosophist or an occultist. He based his reconstruction of paganism on a chimerical fusion of it with oriental elements that the craze for mysticism had
incorporated into the spirit of the age. And so it failed, for paganism had already died, the way all things die, except for the Gods and their inscrutable, tormenting science.

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For modern pagans, as exiles in the midst of an enemy civilization, the only feasible course is to embrace one of the last two schools of pagan thought: Stoicism or Epicureanism. Alberto Caeiro embraced neither, for he was Absolute Paganism, without further implications or ramifications. By contrast I (if I may speak about myself) have chosen to be both an Epicurean and a Stoic, convinced as I am of the useless-ness of every action in a world where action has gone awry, and of every thought in a world that has forgotten how to think.

It may seem we’re no more than degenerate sons of Christian civilization, indifferent because we’re sick or out of sorts, but the truth is quite different. A mysterious fate has displaced us. As if we were engineers born in the African hinterlands, we have capacities that we’re unable to develop, the outlines of a destiny that we’re unable to complete. Our spirit is far removed from the hardened, centuries-old lie of humanitarian monotheism that characterizes Christianity. We can only loathe this civilization so false it has no slaves, so imperfect it must subordinate the intelligence to emotions; and the more it seems to retreat from its religious disease, the more it inclines toward it, for the more it follows after those humanitarian deliriums that typify the slave mentality or, alternatively, it hardens into the absurd rigidity of that discipline so beloved of the Germans, an exaggerated and false paganism—which only goes to show how our civilized mentality has lost its capacity for equilibrium, moderation, and reason.

But who is this “we” in whose name I speak? The only people I can think of are myself, the late Alberto Caeiro, and two others from among everyone I know. But even if it were just me, it wouldn’t matter. If it were a thousand people, I would feel no differently. Those whom the gods one day allowed to see the truth of things in their irreducible
simplicity need only clear-mindedness and a staunch heart, for they can never go back to delighting in the saturnalias of humanitarianism and modern life.

Everything else lies in that point of light we call the Shadows, that vast Point prior to the Gods where—in accord with the absolute mortality of our souls—our ephemeral lives uselessly tend, uselessly arrive, and uselessly remain forever.