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.
Everything that exists perhaps exists because something else exists. Nothing is, everything coexists—perhaps that’s how it really is. I feel I wouldn’t exist right now—or at least wouldn’t exist in the way I’m existing, with this present consciousness of myself, which, because it is consciousness and present, is entirely me in this moment—if that lamp weren’t shining somewhere over there, a useless lighthouse with a specious advantage of height. I feel this because I feel nothing. I think this because this is nothing. Nothing, nothing, part of the night and the silence and what I share with them of vacancy, of negativity, of in-between-ness, a gap between me and myself, something forgotten by some god or other....
451.
Travel? One need only exist to travel. I go from day to day, as from station to station, in the train of my body or my destiny, leaning out over the streets and squares, over people’s faces and gestures, always the same and always different, just like scenery.
If I imagine, I see. What more do I do when I travel? Only extreme poverty of the imagination justifies having to travel to feel.
“Any road, this simple Entepfuhl road, will lead you to the end of the World.”* But the end of the world, when we go around it full circle, is the same Entepfuhl from which we started out. The end of the world, like the beginning, is in fact our concept of the world. It is in us that the
scenery is scenic. If I imagine it, I create it; if I create it, it exists; if it exists, then I see it like any other scenery. So why travel? In Madrid, Berlin, Persia, China, and at the North or South Pole, where would I be but in myself, and in my particular type of sensations?
Life is what we make of it. Travel is the traveler. What we see isn’t what we see but what we are.
465.
The advent of summer makes me sad. It seems that summer’s luminosity, though harsh, should comfort those who don’t know who they are, but it doesn’t comfort me. There’s too sharp a contrast between the teeming life outside me and the forever unburied corpse of my sensations—what I feel and think, without knowing how to feel or think. In this borderless country known as the universe, I feel like I’m living under a political tyranny that doesn’t oppress me directly but that still offends some secret principle of my soul. And then I’m slowly, softly seized by an absurd nostalgia for some future, impossible exile.
What I mostly feel is slumber. Not a slumber that latently brings—like all other slumbers, even those caused by sickness—the privilege of physical rest. Not a slumber that, because it’s going to forget life and perhaps bring dreams, bears the soothing gifts of a grand renunciation on the platter with which it approaches our soul. No: this is a slumber that’s unable to sleep, that weighs on the eyelids without closing them, that purses the corners of one’s disbelieving lips into what feels like a stupid and repulsive expression. It’s the kind of sleepiness that uselessly overwhelms the body when one’s soul is suffering from acute insomnia.
Only when night comes do I feel, not happiness, but a kind of repose which, since other reposes are pleasant, seems pleasant by way of analogy. Then my sleepiness goes away, and the confusing mental dusk brought on by the sleepiness begins to fade and to clear until it almost glows. For a moment there’s the hope of other things. But the hope is short-lived. What comes next is a hopeless, sleepless tedium, the unpleasant waking up of one who never fell asleep. And from the window of my room I gaze with my wretched soul and exhausted body at the countless stars—countless stars, nothing, nothingness, but countless stars....
472.
To attain the satisfactions of the mystic state without having to endure its rigors; to be the ecstatic follower of no god, the mystic or epopt* with no initiation; to pass the days meditating on a paradise you don’t believe in—all of this tastes good to the soul that knows it knows nothing.
The silent clouds drift high above me, a body inside a shadow; the hidden truths drift high above me, a soul imprisoned in a body.... Everything drifts high above.... And everything high above passes on, just like everything down below, with no cloud leaving behind more than rain, no truth leaving behind more than sorrow.... Yes, everything that’s lofty passes high above, and passes on; everything that’s desirable is in the distance and distantly passes on.... Yes, everything attracts, everything remains foreign, and everything passes on.
What’s the point of knowing that in the sun or in the rain, as a body or a soul, I will also pass on? No point—just the hope that everything is nothing and nothing, therefore, everything.
476.
It will seem to many that my diary, written just for me, is too artificial. But it’s only natural for me to be artificial. How else can I amuse myself except by carefully recording these mental notes? Though I’m not very careful about how I record them. In fact I jot them down in no particular order and with no special care. The refined language of my prose is the language in which I naturally think.
For me the outer world is an inner reality. I feel this not in some metaphysical way but with the senses normally used to grasp reality.
Yesterday’s frivolity is a nostalgia that gnaws at my life today.
There are cloisters in this moment. Night has fallen on all our evasions. A final despair in the blue eyes of the pools reflects the dying sun. We were so many things in the parks of old! We were so voluptuously embodied in the presence of the statues and in the English layout of the paths. The costumes, the foils, the wigs, the graceful motions, and the processions were so much a part of the substance of our spirit! But who does “our” refer to? Just the fountain’s winged water in the deserted garden, shooting less high than it used to in its sad attempt to fly.
481.
I went into the barbershop as usual, with the pleasant sensation of entering a familiar place, easily and naturally. New things are distressing to my sensibility; I’m only at ease in places where I’ve already been.
After I’d sat down in the chair, I happened to ask the young barber, occupied in fastening a clean, cool cloth around my neck, about his older colleague from the chair to the right, a spry fellow who had been sick. I didn’t ask this because I felt obliged to ask something; it was the place and my memory that sparked the question. “He passed away yesterday,” flatly answered the barber’s voice behind me and the linen cloth as his fingers withdrew from the final tuck of the cloth in between my shirt collar and my neck. The whole of my irrational good mood abruptly died, like the eternally missing barber from the adjacent chair. A chill swept over all my thoughts. I said nothing.
Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time’s fleeing is for me an anguish, and life’s mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets—if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life.
The nondescript old man with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning.... The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain.... The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop.... The pale tobacco shop owner.... What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I too will vanish from the Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradores, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too—I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself—yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a “What’s become of him?” And everything I’ve done, everything I’ve felt, and everything I’ve lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.
FROM THE EDUCATION OF THE STOIC
Baron of Teive
The Baron of Teive, who seems to have come into existence in 1928, may have been the last fictional author created by Pessoa. He is also one of the last major voices of this multitudinous yet very private writer to go public. Although a few passages attributed to the baron were published as early as 1960, Pessoa’s blue-blooded alter ego remained an illustrious unknown until 1999, the year of the first edition in Portuguese of A Educação do Estóico (The Education of the Stoic), subtitled “The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive” and sub-subtitled “The Impossibility of Producing Superior Art.”
The three titles summarize a good part of the baron’s trouble. Frustrated because he can’t produce on paper the large literary works he plots in his mind, the baron stoically endures his dispersed, sterile existence at his estate outside Lisbon until he finally decides to call it quits. After burning all his fragmentary writings in the fireplace but before blowing his brains out, he endeavors “to explain with simplicity” in his final manuscript (the only one that will survive) why he wasn’t able to pull off a sustained literary work. But even this final manuscript turns out to be a mishmash of fragments, mere notes to a supreme fiction: Fernando Pessoa as a landed aristocrat who leaves for posterity one perfectly achieved literary work, which would explain to the world why it’s impossible to achieve such a work.
The baron, like Bernardo Soares, is a semiheteronym, a mutilated or distorted version of Pessoa. Besides embodying the literary frustrations and aristocratic pretensions of his creator (who, despite his modest material circumstances, boasted some vaguely noble lineage on his father’s side), Teive also portrays Pessoa’s sexual drama, or lack of it. Although the projected chapter on “Why the Bar
on didn’t seduce more young ladies” didn’t get written, the nobleman does make several references to his impotence vis-à-vis the servant girls at his country estate. We have no way of knowing whether Pessoa was impotent, but we know from his automatic writings that he wasn’t at all happy about his virginity, which was still firmly in place at age twenty-eight and very possibly went with him to the grave.
Sex, nobility, and his literary oeuvre weren’t the only obsessions that Pessoa passed on to the helpless baron, who was forced to die for his inventor’s sins. All of the heteronyms were in one way or another instruments of exorcism and redemption; they were all born to save Pessoa from the life that bored him, or that he didn’t care for, or that he had little aptitude for; but Teive incorporated the most dangerous aspect of his progenitor: implacable, unbridled reason. “My mind has always ruled my feelings,” the baron confesses, and when he arrives at the conclusion that it’s “impossible to live life according to reason,” suicide is the way out that his reason logically imposes. Or that was imposed on him by Fernando Pessoa, forever faithful to literature.
I’ve reached the height of emptiness, the plenitude of nothing at all. What will lead me to commit suicide is the same kind of urge that makes one go to bed early. I’m tired to death of all intentions.
Nothing at this point can change my life.
If.... If....
Yes, but if is always something that never happened, and if it never happened, why imagine what it would be if it had?
I sense that the end of my life is near, because I want it to be near. I spent the last two days burning, one by one (and it took two days because I sometimes reread them), all of my manuscripts, the notes of my deceased thoughts, the sketches and even some finished passages of the works I would never have written. It was without hesitation, but with a lingering grief, that I made this sacrifice by which I take my leave—like a man who burns a bridge—from the shore of this life I’m about to abandon. I’m freed. I’m ready. I’m going to kill myself. But I’d at least like to leave an intellectual memoir of my life, a written picture—as accurate as I can make it—of what I was on the inside. Since I wasn’t able to leave a succession of beautiful lies, I want to leave the smidgen of truth that the falsehood of everything lets us suppose we can tell.