Fernando Pessoa (1888 – 1935)
Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously.
I will necessarily say what it seems to me, given that I'm me.
The house clock, place certain there at the bottom of things, strikes the half hour dry and null. All is so much, all is so deep, all is so dark and cold!
Fernando Pessoa is the least known of the masters of twentieth-century poetry. From his heteronymic passion he produced, if that is the word, two of our greatest poets. Alberto Caeiro and Álvaro de Campos, and a third, Ricardo Reis, who isn't bad. Pessoa is the exemplary poet of the self as other, of the poem as testament to unreality, proclamation of nothingness, occasion for expectancy.
I am not nothing.
I will never be nothing.
I cannot ever want to be nothing.
Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams of the world.
It's in an inland sea that the river of my life ended.
Given that we cannot know all the elements in a problem, we never can solve it.
I always live in the present. The future I can't know. The past I no longer have.
These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write it with some semblance of truth.
Some sensations are sleeps that take up all the extent of the mind like a fog, don't let us think, don't let us act, don't let us be clearly.
The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is intelligence's oldest tax.
Who wants to go beyond the Bojador
Must go beyond pain.
I never cared about whatever tragic event happened in China. It's faraway decoration, even if in blood and plague.
[Pessoa] is the modernist's modernist: an inspired amalgam of Lewis Carroll, Aristophanes, Erasmus, Voltaire (& Co., if you will), whose exquisite mixed praises of human and literary folly create a polyphony unlike any other prose music you've ever heard.
Solitude desolates me; company oppresses me.
Irony is the first hint that consciousness became conscious.
All pleasure is a vice, for seeking pleasure is what everybody does in life, and the only dark vice is doing what everybody does.
There's no regret more painful than the regret of things that never were.
I think of life as an inn where I have to stay until the abyss coach arrives. I don't know where it will take me, for I know nothing.
Only sterility is noble and dignified. Only killing what never was is elevated and perverse and absurd.