The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (43 page)

Wearier, older, and less willing, I sit down at the high desk and continue working from where I left off yesterday. But today’s vague tragedy, stirring thoughts I have to dominate by force, interrupts the automatic process of good bookkeeping. The only way I’m able to work is through an active inertia, as my own slave. The office boy left today.

Yes, tomorrow or another day, or whenever the bell will soundlessly toll my death or departure, I’ll also be one who’s no longer here, an old copier stowed away in the cabinet under the stairs. Yes, tomorrow or when Fate decides, the one in me who pretended to be I will come to an end. Will I go to my hometown? I don’t know where I’ll go. Today the tragedy is visible because of an absence, considerable because it doesn’t deserve consideration. My God, my God, the office boy left today.

298.

Everything is absurd. One man spends his life earning and saving up money, although he has no children to leave it to nor any hope that some heaven might reserve him a transcendent portion. Another man strives to gain posthumous fame without believing in an afterlife that would give him knowledge of that fame. Yet another wears himself out in pursuit of things he doesn’t really care for. Then there’s one who ….

One man reads so as to learn, uselessly. Another man enjoys himself so as to live, uselessly.

I’m riding on a streetcar and, as usual, am closely observing all the details of the people around me. For me these details are like things, voices, phrases. Taking the dress of the girl in front of me, I break it down into the fabric from which it’s made and the work that went into making it (such that I see a dress and not just fabric), and the delicate embroidery that trims the collar decomposes under my scrutiny into the silk thread with which it was embroidered and the work it took to embroider it. And immediately, as in a textbook of basic economics, factories and jobs unfold before me: the factory where the cloth was made; the factory where the darker-colored silk was spun to trim with curlicues its place around the neck; the factories’ various divisions, the machines, the workers, the seamstresses. My inwardly turned eyes penetrate into the offices, where I see the managers trying to stay calm, and I watch everything being recorded in the account books. But that’s not all: I see beyond all this to the private lives of those who live their social existence in these factories and offices. The whole world opens up before my eyes merely because in front of me—on the nape of a dark-skinned
neck whose other side has I don’t know what face—I see a regularly irregular dark-green embroidery on a light-green dress.

All humanity’s social existence lies before my eyes.

And beyond this I sense the loves, the secrets, and the souls of all who labored so that the woman in front of me in the streetcar could wear, around her mortal neck, the sinuous banality of a dark-green silk trim on a less dark green cloth.

I get dizzy. The seats in the streetcar, made of tough, close-woven straw, take me to distant places and proliferate in the form of industries, workers, their houses, lives, realities, everything.

I get off the streetcar dazed and exhausted. I’ve just lived all of life.

299.

Every time I go somewhere, it’s a vast journey. A train trip to Cascais* tires me out as if in this short time I’d traveled through the urban and rural landscapes of four or five countries.

I imagine myself living in each house I pass, each chalet, each isolated cottage whitewashed with lime and silence—happy at first, then bored, then fed up. It all happens in a moment, and as soon as I’ve abandoned one of these homes, I’m filled with nostalgia for the time I lived there. And so every trip I make is a painful and happy harvest of great joys, great boredoms, and countless false nostalgias.

And as I pass by those houses, villas, and chalets, I also live the daily lives of all their inhabitants, living them all at the same time. I’m the father, mother, sons, cousins, the maid, and the maid’s cousin, all together and all at once, thanks to my special talent for simultaneously feeling various and sundry sensations, for simultaneously living the lives of various people—both on the outside, seeing them, and on the inside, feeling them.

I’ve created various personalities within. I constantly create personalities. Each of my dreams, as soon as I starting dreaming it, is immediately incarnated in another person, who is then the one dreaming it, and not I.

To create, I’ve destroyed myself. I’ve so externalized myself on the inside that I don’t exist there except externally. I’m the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

317.

One of my constant preoccupations is to understand how other people can exist, how there can be souls that aren’t mine, consciousnesses that have nothing to do with my own, which—because it’s a consciousness—seems to me like the only one. I accept that the man standing before me, who speaks with words like mine and gesticulates as I do or could do, is in some sense my fellow creature. But so are the figures from illustrations that fill my imagination, the characters I meet in novels, and the dramatic personae that move on stage through the actors who represent them.

No one, I suppose, genuinely admits the real existence of another person. We may concede that the person is alive and that he thinks and feels as we do, but there will always be an unnamed element of difference, a materialized inequality. There are figures from the past and living images from books that are more real to us than the incarnate indifferences that talk to us over shop counters, or happen to glance at us in the streetcars, or brush against us in the dead happenstance of the streets. Most people are no more for us than scenery, generally the invisible scenery of a street we know by heart.

I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I’ve seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And “flesh and blood” in fact describes them rather well: they’re like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher’s, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.

I’m not ashamed of feeling this way, as I’ve discovered that’s how everyone feels. What seems to lie behind people’s mutual contempt and indifference, such that they can kill each other like assassins who don’t really feel they’re killing, or like soldiers who don’t think about what they’re doing, is that no one pays heed to the apparently abstruse fact that other people are also living souls.

On certain days, in certain moments, brought to me by I don’t know what breeze and opened to me by the opening of I don’t know what door, I suddenly feel that the corner grocer is a thinking entity, that his assistant, who at this moment is bent over a sack of potatoes next to the entrance, is truly a soul capable of suffering.

When I was told yesterday that the employee of the tobacco shop had committed suicide, it seemed like a lie. Poor man, he also existed! We had forgotten this, all of us, all who knew him in the same way as all those who never met him. Tomorrow we’ll forget him even better. But he evidently had a soul, for he killed himself. Passion? Anxiety? No doubt.... But for me, as for all humanity, there’s only the memory of a dumb smile and a shabby sports coat that hung unevenly from the shoulders. That’s all that remains to me of this man who felt so much that he killed himself for feeling, since what else does one kill himself for? Once, as I was buying cigarettes from him, it occurred to me that he would go bald early. As it turns out, he didn’t have time enough to go bald. That’s one of the memories I have of him. What other one can I have, if even this one is not of him but of one of my thoughts?

I suddenly see his corpse, the coffin where they placed him, the so alien grave where they must have lowered him, and it dawns on me that the cashier of the tobacco shop, with crooked coat and all, was in a certain way the whole of humanity.

It was only a flash. What’s clear to me now, today, as the human being I am, is that he died. That’s all.

No, others don’t exist.... It’s for me that this heavy-winged sunset lingers, its colors hard and hazy. It’s for me that the great river shimmers below the sunset, even if I can’t see it flow. It’s for me that this square was built overlooking the river, whose waters are now rising. Was the cashier of the tobacco shop buried today in the common grave? Then the sun isn’t setting for him today. But because I think this, and against my will, it has also stopped setting for me.

348.

Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others—not even the hatred of others, since hatred is at least more intermittent than affection;
being an unpleasant emotion, it naturally tends to be less frequent in those who feel it. But hatred as well as love is oppressive; both seek us, pursue us, won’t leave us alone.

My ideal would be to live everything through novels and to use real life for resting up—to read my emotions and to live my disdain of them. For someone with a keen and sensitive imagination, the adventures of a fictional protagonist are genuine emotion enough, and more, since they are experienced by us as well as the protagonist. No greater romantic adventure exists than to have loved Lady Macbeth with true and directly felt love. After a love like that, what can one do but take a rest, not loving anyone in the real world?

I don’t know the meaning of this journey I was forced to make, between one and another night, in the company of the whole universe. I know I can read to amuse myself. Reading seems to me the easiest way to pass the time on this as on other journeys. I occasionally lift my eyes from the book where I’m truly feeling and glance, as a foreigner, at the scenery slipping by—fields, cities, men and women, fond attachments, yearnings—and all this is no more to me than an incident in my repose, an idle distraction to rest my eyes from the pages I’ve been reading so intently.

Only what we dream is what we truly are, because all the rest, having been realized, belongs to the world and to everyone. If I were to realize a dream, I’d be jealous, for it would have betrayed me by allowing itself to be realized. “I’ve achieved everything I wanted,” says the feeble man, and it’s a lie; the truth is that he prophetically dreamed all that life achieved through him. We achieve nothing. Life hurls us like a stone, and we sail through the air saying, “Look at me move.”

Whatever be this interlude played out under the spotlight of the sun and the spangles of the stars, surely there’s no harm in knowing it’s an interlude. If what’s beyond the theater doors is life, then we will live, and if it’s death, we will die, and the play has nothing to do with this.

That is why I never feel so close to truth, so initiated into its secrets, as on the rare occasions when I go to the theater or the circus: then I know that I’m finally watching life’s perfect representation. And the actors and actresses, the clowns and magicians, are important and
futile things, like the sun and the moon, love and death, the plague, hunger and war among humanity. Everything is theater. Is it truth I want? I’ll go back to my novel....

349.

The most abject of all needs is to confide, to confess. It’s the soul’s need to externalize.

Go ahead and confess, but confess what you don’t feel. Go ahead and tell your secrets to get their weight off your soul, but let the secrets you tell be secrets you’ve never had.

Lie to yourself before you tell that truth. Expressing yourself is always a mistake. Be resolutely conscious: let expression, for you, be synonymous with lying.

382.

I’ve reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

396.

After the last rains left the sky for earth, making the sky clear and the earth a damp mirror, the brilliant clarity of life that returned with the blue on high and that rejoiced in the freshness of the water here below left its own sky in our souls, a freshness in our hearts.

Whether we like it or not we’re servants of the hour and its colors and shapes, we’re subjects of the sky and earth. Even those who delve only in themselves, disdaining what surrounds them, delve by different paths when it rains and when it’s clear. Obscure transmutations, perhaps felt only in the depths of abstract feelings, occur because it rains or stops raining. They’re felt without our feeling them because the weather we didn’t feel made itself felt.

Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways. At this very moment, jotting down these impressions during a break that’s excusable
because today there’s not much work, I’m the one who is attentively writing them, I’m the one who is glad not to have to be working right now, I’m the one seeing the sky outside, invisible from in here, I’m the one thinking about all of this, I’m the one feeling my body satisfied and my hands still a bit cold. And my entire world of all these souls who don’t know each other casts, like a motley but compact multitude, a single shadow—the calm, bookkeeping body with which I lean over Borges’s tall desk, where I’ve come to get the blotter that he borrowed from me.

430.

Having seen how lucidly and logically certain madmen justify their lunatic ideas to themselves and to others, I can never again be sure of the lucidness of my lucidity.

441.

High in the nocturnal solitude an anonymous lamp flourishes behind a window. All else that I see in the city is dark, save where feeble reflections of light hazily ascend from the streets and cause a pallid, inverse moonlight to hover here and there. The buildings’ various colors, or shades of colors, are hardly distinguishable in the blackness of the night; only vague, seemingly abstract differences break the regularity of the congested ensemble.

An invisible thread links me to the unknown owner of the lamp. It’s not the mutual circumstance of us both being awake; in this there can be no reciprocity, for my window is dark, so that he cannot see me. It’s something else, something all my own that’s related to my feeling of isolation, that participates in the night and in the silence, and that chooses the lamp as an anchor because it’s the only anchor there is. It seems to be its glowing that makes the night so dark. It seems to be the fact I’m awake, dreaming in the dark, that makes the lamp shine.