Ah, to depart!

Ah, to depart! By whatever means and to whatever place!
To set out across the waves, across unknown perils, across the sea!
To go Far, to go Wide, toward Abstract Distance,
Indefinitely, through deep and mysterious nights,
Carried like dust by the winds, by the gales!
To go, go, go once and for all!
All of my blood lusts for wings!
All of my body lurches forward!
I rush through my imagination in torrents!
I trample myself underfoot, I growl, I hurtle!
My yearnings bust into foam
And my flesh is a wave crashing into cliffs!

Alvaro de Campos, 'Maritime Ode', in Fernando Pessoa, A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe (Penguin Books, 2006) p. 174

We manufacture realities

We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the colour of our notions about what we do know: if we call death a sleep it's because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it's because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread that we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

But that's how all of life is; at least that's how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but also a table.We sit down at the table, not at the pinetree. Although love is a sexual instinct, we do not love with that instinct, rather we presuppose the existence of another feeling, and that presupposition is, effectively, another feeling.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 53

Civilization is an education of nature

Only people who wear clothes find the naked body beautiful. The overriding value of modesty for sensuality is that it acts as a brake on energy. Artificiality is a way of enjoying naturalness. What I enjoyed about these vast fields I enjoyed because I don't live here. Someone who has never known constraint can have no concept of freedom. Civilization is an education of nature. The artificial provides an approach to the natural. What we must never do, however, is mistake the artificial for the natural. In the harmony between the natural and the artificial lies the essence of the superior human soul.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 52

To live is to be other

To live is to be other. Even feeling is impossible if one feels today what one felt yesterday, for that is not to feel, it is only to remember today what one felt yesterday, to be the living corpse of yesterday's lost life.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 48

Nostalgia!

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (Serpent's Tail, 1991) p. 6