Have you ever considered, beloved other, how invisible we are to each other? We look at each other without seeing. We listen to each other and hear only a voice inside out self.
The words of others are mistakes of our hearing, shipwrecks of our understanding. How confidently we believe OUR meanings of other people's words.
Portuguese poet, writer, and philosopher (1888–1935); creator of the heteronymic system including Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos, and Bernardo Soares
Fernando Pessoa (13 June 1888 – 30 November 1935) was a Portuguese poet and writer, most of whose work was published posthumously. He wrote frequently under heteronyms, alter egos with developed personalities, biographies, jobs, habits, attitudes, addresses, etc., who sometimes quoted and interacted with each other and other people.
Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Portrait adapted from: Wikimedia Commons, S.A. e Maria José de Lencastre (Public domain / CC0)
Pen Names:
Alberto Caeiro
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Álvaro de Campos
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Ricardo Reis
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Bernardo Soares
Native Name:
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
Alternative Names:
Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa
From Wikidata (CC0)
I never tried to be anything other than a dreamer. I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.
I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I cease being myself and so scattered. And what I read, instead of being like a nearly invisible suit that sometimes oppresses me, is the external world's tremendous and remarkable clarity, the sun that sees everyone, the moon that splotches the still earth with shadows, the wide expanses that end in the sea, the blackly solid trees whose tops greenly wave, the steady peace of ponds on farms, the terraced slopes with their paths overgrown by grape-vines.
For a long time now I haven't existed. I'm utterly calm. No one distinguishes me from who I am. I just felt myself breath as if I'd done something new, or done it late. I'm beginning to be conscious of being conscious. Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up to myself and resume the course of my existence. I don't know if that will make more happy or less. I don't know anything.
I had the same sensation as when we watch someone sleep. When asleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of slumber we can do no wrong and are unconscious of life, the greatest criminal and most self-absorbed egotist are holy, by a natural magic, as long as they're sleeping. For me there's no discernible difference between killing a child and killing a sleeping man.
Nunca amamos alguém. Amamos, tão-somente, a ideia que fazemos de alguém. É a um conceito nosso - em suma, é a nós mesmos - que amamos.
Isto é verdade em toda a escala do amor. No amos sexual buscamos um prazer nosso por intermédio de um corpo estranho. No amor diferente do sexual, buscamos um prazer nosso dado por intermédio de uma ideia nossa. O onanista é objecto, mas, em exacta verdade, o onanista é a perfeita expressão lógica do amoroso. É o único que não disfarça nem se engana.
The feelings that hurt most, the motions that sting most, are those that are absurd; the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these half-tones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.