And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student … - Fernando Pessoa
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And with a relentlessness that comes from the world's depths, with a persistence that strikes the keys metaphysically, the scales of a piano student keep playing over and over, up and down the physical backbone of my memory. It's the old streets with other people, the same streets that today are different; it's dead people speaking to me through the transparency of their absence; it's remorse for what I did or didn't do; it's the rippling of streams in the night, noises from below in the quiet building.
I feel like screaming inside my head. I want to stop, to break, to smash this impossible phonograph record that keeps playing inside me, where it doesn't belong, an intangible torturer. I want my soul, a vehicle taken over by others, to let me off and go on without me. I'm going crazy from having to hear. And in the end it is I – in my odiously impressionable brain, in my thin skin, in my hypersensitive nerves – who am the keys played in scales, O horrible and personal piano of our memory.
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.
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, S.A. e Maria José de Lencastre (Public domain / CC0)
Also Known As
Pen Names:
Alberto Caeiro
•
Álvaro de Campos
•
Ricardo Reis
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Bernardo Soares
Native Name:
Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa
Alternative Names:
Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa
Original: Se um homem escreve bem só quando está bêbado dir-lhe-ei: embebede-se- E se ele me disser que o seu fígado sofre com isso, respondo: o que é o seu fígado? É uma coisa morta que vive enquanto você vive, e os poemas que escrever vivem sem enquanto.
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.
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Original: Viajar? Para viajar basta existir. [...] Para quê viajar? Em Madrid, em Berlim, na Pérsia, na China, nos Pólos ambos, onde estaria eu senão em mim mesmo, e no tipo e género das minhas sensações? A vida é o que fazemos dela. As viagens são os viajantes. O que vemos não é o que vemos, senão o que somos.
