Fernando Pessoa

                Sometimes we are introduced to authors who change our lives.  I could literally name fifty right now, but I’m going to focus on the one who is doing it right this second:  Fernando Pessoa.  For those who are unfamiliar with this man, he died in 1935, and left behind a pile of writing which articulates his thoughts about life.  Who cares?  Good question.  Why should we care about what one man has to say about anything?  Because sometimes, those people find their way into the recesses of our minds and plant themselves.  Thank god.

                Fernando was a scholar who wrote prose, poetry, and literary criticism.  He was generally unrecognized until after his death, but that seems to be true of many of the best and brightest philosophers of their time.  The common man does not appreciate philosophy – too much thinking.  I am not common, however, so I love this man’s attempt to postulate on the state of humankind.  Fernando is many different people, fragmented into heteronyms which speak their minds concurrently.  How lovely.  And how truthful, as we are all different people in different moments – depending on how a mood might strike us. 

                So here are some of my favorite Fernando Pessoa quotes:

·         How often my dreams have raised up before me as things, not to replace reality but to declare themselves its equals, in so far as I scorn them and they exist apart from me.

·         What should theoretically humiliate me is what I unfurl as my flag.

·         I ask for very little from life … not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have other demand anything from me.

·         For me, life is whatever is external.

·         Everything interests me, but nothing holds me.

·         I write what I feel; it’s to reduce the fever of feeling.

·         What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse.  That’s enough for me …

·         Whether or not they exist, we’re slaves to the gods.

·         Absurdity is divine.

·         Literature is art married to thought and realization untainted by reality.

·         I read and am liberated.

·         I’m physically nauseated by commonplace humanity, which is the only kind there is.  And sometimes I willfully aggravate the nausea, like someone who induces vomiting to be relieved of the urge to vomit.

·         I’m oppressed by the very self that encases me, asphyxiated by conclusions, and I’d gladly scream if my voice could reach somewhere.

·         When asleep we all become children again.

·         The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with other is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I fell with my thoughts.

·         A sunset is an intellectual phenomenon.

thank you, Fernando Pessoa, for breathing air and living life and writing things which make me think