Fernando Pessoa

In his pale, uninteresting face there was a look of suffering that didn’t add any interest, and it was difficult to say just what kind of suffering this look suggested. It seemed to suggest various kinds: hardships, anxieties, and the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having already suffered a lot.

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams, and their hopeless hopes. In these moments my heart beats faster because I’m conscious of it. I live more because I live on high. I feel a religious force within me, a species of prayer, a kind of public outcry.

Let us absurdify life from east to west.

My dreams: since I create friends in my dreams, I walk with them. Their alien imperfection …

Lacking the ability to love, we grow weary, even before they are spoken, of the words we would have to say in order to be loved. Besides, which of us wants to be loved? Chateaubriand’s words “on le fatiguait en l’aimant” are not appropriate for us. The very idea of being loved wearies us to the point of alarm.

Life for us is whatever we imagine it to be. To the peasant with his one field, that field is everything, it is an empire. To Caesar with his vast empire which still feels cramped, that empire is a field. The poor man has an empire; the great man only a field. The truth is that we possess nothing but our own sensations; it is on them, then, and not on what they perceive, that we must base the reality of our life.

But all this is apropos of nothing

what ship did I make this journey? In the steamship Anyship. You laugh. So do I, possibly at you. Who is to say that I am not writing symbols for the gods to understand?

An Aesthetics of Artifice
Life gets in the way of being able to express life. If I were to experience a great love, I would never be able to describe it

exotic flower of my artificiality can bloom in secluded beauty.

to tell you how the desire to achieve something far outstrips what we actually achieve.