Showing posts with label Fernando Pessoa. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fernando Pessoa. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 27, 2020

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



 

Wednesday, July 17, 2019

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





Tuesday, April 9, 2019

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


Friday, July 22, 2011

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




Friday, February 18, 2011

a symphony



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...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.

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~ Fernando Pessoa
in a letter to his friend Casais Monteiro

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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

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Friday, October 1, 2010

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
.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Unto our very selves we are abridged


.
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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 
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Saturday, October 17, 2009

To be great be entire

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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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