The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (45 page)

In times of painful doubt, when I knew from the start that I’d go wrong, what made me furious at myself was the disproportionate weight of the social factor in my decisions. I was never able to overcome the influence of heredity and my upbringing. I could pooh-pooh the sterile concepts of nobility and social rank, but I never succeeded in forgetting them. They’re like an inborn cowardice, which I loathe and struggle against but which binds my mind and my will with inscrutable ties. Once I had the chance to marry a simple girl who could perhaps have made me happy, but between me and her, in my soul’s indecision, stood fourteen generations of barons, a mental image of the whole town smirking at my wedding, the sarcasm of friends I’m not even close to, and a huge uneasiness made of mean and petty thoughts—so many petty thoughts that it weighed on me like the commission of a crime. And so I, the man of reason and detachment, lost out on happiness because of the neighbors I disdain.

How I’d dress, how I’d act, how I’d receive people in my house (where perhaps I wouldn’t have to receive anyone), all the uncouth expressions and naive attitudes that her affection wouldn’t veil nor her devotion make me forget—all of this loomed like a specter of serious things, as if it were an argument, on sleepless nights when I tried to defend my desire to have her in the endless web of impossibilities that has always entangled me.

I still remember—so vividly I can smell the gentle fragrance of the spring air—the afternoon when I decided, after thinking everything over, to abdicate from love as from an insoluble problem. It was in May, a May that was softly summery, with the flowers around my estate already in full bloom, their colors fading as the sun made its slow descent. Escorted by regrets and self-reproach, I walked among my few trees. I had dined early and was wandering, alone like a symbol, under the useless
shadows and faint rustle of leaves. And suddenly I was overwhelmed by a desire to renounce completely, to withdraw once and for all, and I felt an intense nausea for having had so many desires, so many hopes, with so many outer conditions for attaining them and so much inner impossibility of really wanting to attain them. That soft and sad moment marks the beginning of my suicide.

I belong to a generation—assuming that this generation includes others besides me—that lost its faith in the gods of the old religions as well as in the gods of modern nonreligions. I reject Jehovah as I reject humanity. For me, Christ and progress are myths from the same world. I don’t believe in the Virgin Mary, and I don’t believe in electricity.

It is impossible to live life according to reason. Intelligence provides no guiding rule. This realization unveiled for me what is perhaps hidden in the myth of the Fall. As when one’s physical gaze is struck by lightning, my soul’s vision was struck by the terrible and true meaning of the temptation that led Adam to eat from the so-called Tree of Knowledge.

Where intelligence exists, life is impossible.

Our problem isn’t that we’re individualists. It’s that our individualism is static rather than dynamic. We value what we think rather than what we do. We forget that we haven’t done, or been, what we thought; that the first function of life is action, just as the first property of things is motion.

Giving importance to what we think because we thought it, taking our own selves not only (to quote the Greek philosopher)* as the measure of all things but as their norm or standard, we create in ourselves, if not an interpretation, at least a criticism of the universe, which we don’t even know and therefore cannot criticize. The giddiest, most weak-minded of us then promote that criticism to an interpretation—an interpretation that’s superimposed, like a hallucination; induced rather than deduced. It’s a hallucination in the strict sense, being an illusion based on something only dimly seen.

* * *

Modern man, if he’s unhappy, is a pessimist.

There’s something contemptible, something degrading, in this projection of our personal sorrows onto the whole universe. There’s something shamefully egocentric in supposing that the universe is inside us, or that we’re a kind of nucleus and epitome, or symbol, of it.

The fact I suffer may be an impediment to the existence of an unequivocally good Creator, but it doesn’t prove the nonexistence of a Creator, or the existence of an evil Creator, or even the existence of a neutral Creator. It proves only that evil exists in the world—something that can hardly be called a discovery, and that no one has yet tried to deny.

I’ve never been able to believe that I, or that anyone, could offer any effective relief for human ills, much less cure them. But I’ve never been able to ignore them either. The tiniest human anguish—even the slightest thought of one—has always upset and anguished me, preventing me from focusing just on myself. My conviction that all remedies for the soul are useless should naturally lift me to a summit of indifference, below which the clouds of that same conviction would cover from view all the hubbub on earth. But powerful as thought is, it can do nothing to quell rebellious emotions. We can’t choose not to feel, as we can not to walk. And so I witness, as I’ve always witnessed, ever since I can remember feeling with the higher emotions, all the pain, injustice, and misery that’s in the world, as a paralytic might witness the drowning of a man whom no one, however able-bodied, could save. In me the pain of others became more than a simple pain: there was the pain of seeing it, the pain of seeing that it was incurable, and the pain of knowing that my awareness of its incurableness precluded even the useless noble-mindedness of wishing I felt like doing something to cure it. My lack of initiative was the root cause of all my troubles—of my inability to want something before having thought about it, of my inability to commit myself, of my inability to decide in the only way one can decide: by deciding, not by thinking. I’m like Buridan’s donkey,* dying at the mathematical midpoint
between the water of emotion and the hay of action; if I didn’t think, I might still die, but it wouldn’t be from thirst or hunger.

Whatever I think or feel inevitably turns into a form of inertia. Thought, which for other people is a compass to guide action, is for me its microscope, making me see whole universes to span where a footstep would have sufficed, as if Zeno’s argument about the impossibility of crossing a given space—which, being infinitely divisible, is therefore infinite—were a strange drug that had intoxicated my psychological self. And feeling, which in other people enters the will like a hand in a glove, or like a fist in the guard of a sword, was always in me another form of thought—futile like a rage that makes us tremble so much we can’t move, or like a panic (the panic, in my case, of feeling too intensely) that freezes the frightened man in his tracks, when his fright should make him flee.

My whole life has been a battle lost on the map. Cowardice didn’t even make it to the battlefield, where perhaps it would have dissipated; it haunted the chief of staff in his office, all alone with his certainty of defeat. He didn’t dare implement his battle plan, since it was sure to be imperfect, and he didn’t dare perfect it (though it could never be truly perfect), since his conviction that it would never be perfect killed all his desire to strive for perfection. Nor did it ever occur to him that his plan, though imperfect, might be closer to perfection than the enemy’s. The truth is that my real enemy, victorious over me since God, was that very idea of perfection, marching against me at the head of all the troops of the world—in the tragic vanguard of all the world’s armed men.

I could easily have seduced any of the housemaids in my service. But some were too big, or seemed big because they were so vivacious, and in their presence I felt automatically shy, unnerved; I couldn’t even dream of seducing them. Others were too small, or delicate, and I felt sorry for them. Others were unattractive. And so I passed by the specific phenomenon of love as I passed, more or less, by the general phenomenon of life.

The fear of hurting others, the sensuality aroused by physical acts, my awareness of the real existence of other souls—these things were
trammels to my life, and I ask myself now what good they did me, or anybody else. The girls I didn’t seduce were seduced by others, for it was inevitable that somebody seduce them. I had scruples where other men didn’t think twice, and after seeing what I didn’t do done by others, I wondered: Why did I think so much if it only made me suffer?

I first realized how utterly disinterested I was in myself and in what I once held closest to heart when one day, going home, I heard a fire alarm that seemed to be in my neighborhood. It occurred to me that my house might be in flames (though it wasn’t, after all), and whereas I once would have been possessed by horror at the thought of all my manuscripts going up in smoke, I noticed, to my astonishment, that the possibility of my house being on fire left me indifferent, almost happy in the thought of how much simpler my life would be without those manuscripts. In the past, the loss of my manuscripts—of my life’s fragmentary but carefully wrought oeuvre—would have driven me mad, but now I viewed the prospect as a casual incident of my fate, not as a fatal blow that would annihilate my personality by annihilating its manifestations.

I began to understand how the continuous struggle for an unattainable perfection finally tires us out, and I understood the great mystics and great ascetics, who recognize life’s futility in their soul. What of me would be lost in those written sheets? Before, I would have said “everything.” Today I’d say “nothing,” or “not much,” or “something strange.”

I had become, to myself, an objective reality. But in doing so I couldn’t tell if I had found myself or lost myself.

To think like spiritualists and act like materialists. It’s not an absurd creed; it’s the spontaneous creed of all humanity.

What’s the life of humanity but a religious evolution with no influence on daily life?

Humanity is attracted to what’s ideal, and the loftier and less human the ideal, the more attractive it will be to the praxis (if it’s progressive)
of humanity’s civilized life, which thus passes from nation to nation, from era to era, from civilization to civilization. Civilized humanity opens its arms to a religion that preaches chastity, to a religion that preaches equality, to a religion that preaches peace. But normal humanity procreates, discriminates, and clashes continously, and will do so for as long as it lasts.

To think that I considered this incoherent heap of half-written scraps a literary work! To think, in this decisive moment, that I believed myself capable of organizing all these pieces into a finished, visible whole! If the organizational power of thought were enough to make the work materialize, if this organization could be achieved by the emotional intensity that suffices for a short poem or brief essay, then the work I aspired to would have doubtless taken shape, for it would have shaped itself in me, without my help as a determining agent.

Had I concentrated on what was possible for my unaggressive will, I know I could have produced short essays from the fragments of my unachievable masterpiece. I could have put together several miscellanies of finished, well-rounded prose pieces. I could have collected many of the phrases scattered among my notes into more than just a book of thoughts, and it wouldn’t be superficial or old hat.

My pride, however, won’t let me settle for less than my mind is capable of. I’ve never allowed myself to go halfway, to accept anything less in the work I do than my whole personality and entire ambition. Had I felt that my mind was incapable of synthetic work, I would have bridled my pride, seeing it as a form of madness. But the deficiency wasn’t in my mind, which was always very good at synthesizing and organizing. The problem was in my lukewarm will to make the enormous effort that a finished whole requires.

By this standard perhaps no creative work anywhere would ever have been made. I realize that. I realize that if all the great minds had scrupulously desired to do only what was perfect, or at least (since perfection is impossible) what was in complete accord with their entire personality, then they would have given up, like me.

Only those who are more willful than intelligent, more impulsive than rational, have a part to play in the real life of this world.
Disjecta membra
, said Carlyle,* is what remains of any poet, or of any man. But an intense pride, like the one that killed me and will yet kill me, won’t admit the idea of subjecting to the humiliation of future ages the deformed, mutilated body that inhabits and defines the soul whose inevitable imperfection it expresses.

Where the soul’s dignity is concerned, I can see no middle course or intermediate term between the ascetic and the common man. If you’re a doer, then do; if a renouncer, then renounce. Do with the brutality that doing entails; renounce with the absoluteness of renunciation. Renounce without tears or self-pity, lord at least in the vehemence of your renunciation. Disdain yourself, but with dignity.

To weep before the world—and the more beautiful the weeping, the more the world opens up to the weeper, and the more public is his shame—this is the ultimate indignity that can be wreaked on the inner life by a defeated man who didn’t keep his sword to do his final duty as a soldier. We are all soldiers in this instinctive regiment called life; we must live by the law of reason or by no law. Gaiety is for dogs; whining is for women. Man has only his honor and silence. I felt this more than ever while watching the flames in the fireplace consume my writings once and for all.

The mind’s dignity is to acknowledge that it is limited and that reality is outside it. To acknowledge, with or without dismay, that nature’s laws do not bend to our wishes, that the world exists independently of our will, that our own sadness proves nothing about the moral condition of the stars or even of the people who pass by our windows—in this acknowledgment lies the mind’s true purpose and the soul’s rational dignity.

Even now, when nothing attracts me but death (which is “nothing”), I quickly lean out the window to see the cheerful groups of farm workers going home, singing almost religiously, in the still evening air. I recognize that their life is happy. I recognize it at the edge of the grave that I myself will dig, and I recognize it with the ultimate pride of not failing to recognize it. What does the personal sorrow that torments me have
to do with the universal greenness of the trees, with the natural cheer of these young men and women? What does the wintry end into which I am sinking have to do with the spring that’s now in the world thanks to natural laws, whose action on the course of the stars makes the roses bloom, and whose action in me makes me end my life?