the last day

This may be the last day of my life.

I lifted my right hand to wave at the sun,

but I did not wave at it in farewell.

I was glad I could still see it - that's all.

~ Fernando Pessoa

translation by Richard Zenith

 

wander

"Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality—it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.

In the ordinary jumble of my literary drawer, I sometimes find texts I wrote ten, fifteen, or even more years ago. And many of them seem to me written by a stranger: I simply do not recognize myself in them. There was a person who wrote them, and it was I. I experienced them, but it was in another life, from which I just woke up, as if from someone else’s dream.

I often find texts of mine that I wrote when I was very young—when I was seventeen or twenty. And some have a power of expression that I do not remember having them. Certain sentences and passages I wrote when I had just taken a few steps away from adolescence seem produced by the self I am today, educated by years and things. I recognize I am the same as I was. And having felt I am today making a great progress from what I was, I wonder where this progress is if I was then the same as I am today.

Just a few days earlier I suffered horribly reading a short text I’d written earlier. I remember perfectly that my scruples—at least as far as language is concerned—are only a few years old. In a drawer I found a much older text in which those same scruples were strongly accentuated. I didn’t understand myself in the past in a positive way. How did I advance towards what I already was? How can the person who knows me today not know me yesterday? 

All this confuses me in a labyrinth where I am with myself and wander away from myself.

I wander with my thoughts and I’m sure that what I’m writing now I already wrote. I remember. And I ask the being that in me presumes to exist if there might not be in the Platonism of sensations another, more appropriate amamnesis, another memory of a former life that might only be of this life…

My God, my God, whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? What is this space between myself and myself?"

~ Fernando Pessoa
 from The Book of Disquiet

failure to see

Rather the flying bird, leaving no trace

Than the going beast

Marking the earth with his track.

The bird flies by and forgets

(As is only right).  The beast

Where he no longer is

(And is therefore no use)

Marks that he was there before

(Which is also no use).

For to remember is to betray

Nature, since the nature of yesterday

Is not nature.

What has been, is nothing.

Remembering

Is failure to see.

Move on, bird, move on, teach me

To move on.

~ Fernando Pessoa

as translated by Thomas Merton

art by Marefumi Komura

born at each moment into the everlasting newness

.

My gaze is clear as a sunflower.

My way is to walk the roads

Looking right and left

And sometimes looking behind me...

What I see at each moment

Is that which I never

Caught sight of before.

I have the knack of full awareness

The knack of essential astonishment

That an infant might experience

If at birth he were aware

That he was actually born!

I feel myself born at each moment

Into the everlasting newness

of the world.

I believe in the world

As I believe in a daisy

Because I see it.

But I do not think about it

Because to think is to not-understand.

The world was not made 

For us to think about it

(To think is to have sick vision)

But for us to look at it and assent.

I have no philosophy: I have senses ...

If I talk of nature, that is not because

I know what nature is

But because I love it, and love is for this only:

For he who loves never knows what he loves

Or why he loves, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence

And the only innocence is not-thinking.

~ Fernando Pessoa

from The Keeper of the Flocks

translated by Thomas Merton
art by van gogh

a symphony

.

.

...Ever since I was a child, I have had the tendency to create a fictitious world around me, to surround myself with friends and acquaintances who never existed. ( I don’t know, of course, if they didn't really exist or if it is me who doesn't exist. On such matters, as in all others, one shouldn't be dogmatic.) Ever since I became aware of the thing that I call self, I can remember with mental precision, the figures, the movements, the character and the history of several fictitious people who were, to me, as visible and mine as those things which we, perhaps abusively, call real life. This tendency, which exists since I realized that I was a self, has always been with me, modifying slightly the kind of music it uses to bewitch me but never altering its manner of bewitching.

.

~ Fernando Pessoa

in a letter to his friend Casais Monteiro

.

My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments 

grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. 

I can only recognize myself as a symphony.

.

from The Book of Disquiet

.

remembering

Rather the flying bird, leaving no trace

Than the going beast

Marking the earth with his track.

The bird flies by and forgets

(As is only right). The beast

Where he no longer is

(And is therefore no use)

Marks that he was there before

(Which is also no use).

For to remember is to betray

Nature, since the nature of yesterday

Is not nature.

What has been, is nothing.

Remembering

Is failure to see.

Move on, bird, move on, teach me

To move on.

~ Fernando Pessoa

translation by Thomas Merton

.

Unto our very selves we are abridged

.

.

Whether we write or speak or do but look 

We are ever unapparent. What we are 

Cannot be transfused into word or book. 

Our soul from us is infinitely far. 

However much we give our thoughts the will 

To be our soul and gesture it abroad, 

Our hearts are incommunicable still. 

In what we show ourselves we are ignored. 

The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged 

By any skill of thought or trick of seeming. 

Unto our very selves we are abridged 

When we would utter to our thought our being. 

We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams, 

And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.

.

~ Fernando Pessoa 

.

To be great be entire

.

To be great be entire:

Of what is yours nothing 

exaggerate or exclude

Be whole in each thing. Put all that you are

Into the least you do

Like that on each place the whole moon

Shines for she lives aloft.

.

~ Fernando Pessoa

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