Fernando Pessoa

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

Let me return to childhood and stay there forever, caring nothing for the values that grown men give to things or for the relationships that grown men establish between them.

Your gaze has about it a suggestion of music played on board a ship, in the mysterious middle of a river with forests on the opposite shore …

— Don’t tell me it’s because tonight is a moonlit night. I loathe moonlit nights … And yet some people really are in the habit of playing music on moonlit nights …

Believe me, it really hurts me to be sharing these personal confidences with you, for, while they are all false, they do represent genuine scraps of my poor soul … Deep down, you know, the saddest part of us is the least real part, and our greatest tragedies occur in our own idea of ourselves.

All good conversations should be a monologue à deux … We shouldn’t really know for sure if we really are talking to someone or if we’re imagining the whole thing …

I ask myself then if it was worth all the effort I put into isolating and elevating myself, if the slow calvary I made of myself to achieve my Crucified Glory was worth it, was religiously worth the trouble. And even if I know that it was, at that moment, I am weighed down by the feeling that it wasn’t worth the effort and never will be.

Pessoa as: “A little fellow with a big head. He was brilliantly clever but quite mad.”

Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. A

Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries.

I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunlight, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me – this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we’re mean-hearted but because we don’t feel like unbuttoning our coat