The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (44 page)

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.

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 Baron 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.

This will be my only manuscript. I leave it not, as Bacon, to the charitable thoughts of future generations, but (without comparison) to the consideration of those whom the future will make my peers.

Having broken all ties but the last between me and life, I’ve acquired an emotional clarity in my soul and a mental clarity in my intellect that give me the force of words, not to achieve the literary work I could never have achieved, but to offer at least a simple explanation of why I didn’t achieve it.

These pages are not my confession; they’re my definition. And I feel, as I begin to write it, that I can write with some semblance of truth.

There’s no greater tragedy than an equal intensity, in the same soul or the same man, of the intellectual sentiment and the moral sentiment. For a man to be utterly and absolutely moral, he has to be a bit stupid. For a man to be absolutely intellectual, he has to be a bit immoral. I don’t know what game or irony of creation makes it impossible for man to be both things at once. And yet, to my misfortune, this duality occurs in me. Endowed with both virtues, I’ve never been able to make myself into anything. It wasn’t a surfeit of one quality, but of two, that made me unfit to live life.

Whenever and wherever I had an actual or potential rival, I promptly gave up, without a moment’s hesitation. It’s one of the few things in life about which I never hesitated. My pride could never stand the idea of me competing with someone else, particularly since it would mean the horrid possibility of defeat. I refused, for the same reason, to take part in competitive games. If I lost, I always fumed with resentment. Because
I thought I was better than everyone else? No: I never thought I was better in chess or in whist. It was because of sheer pride, a ruthless and raging pride that my mind’s most desperate efforts could do nothing to curb or stanch. I kept my distance from life and the world, and an encounter with any of their elements always offended me like an insult from below, like the sudden defiance of a universal lackey.