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Parque das Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Landscape architecture by Francisco Caldeira Cabral (1908-1992): photo by Manuel Silveira Ramos, 2003 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)
The further we advance in life, the more we become convinced of two contradictory truths. The first is that, confronted by the reality of life, all the fictions of literature and art pale into insignificance… They are just dreams from which one awakens, not memories or nostalgic longings with which we might later live a second life.
The second is this: every noble soul wishes to live life to the full, to experience everything and every feeling, to know every corner of the earth and, given that this is impossible, life can only be lived to the full subjectively, only lived in its entirety once renounced.
The second is this: every noble soul wishes to live life to the full, to experience everything and every feeling, to know every corner of the earth and, given that this is impossible, life can only be lived to the full subjectively, only lived in its entirety once renounced.
These two truths are mutually irreducible…
Nothing satisfies me, nothing consoles me, everything -- whether or not it has ever existed -- satiates me. I neither want my soul nor wish to renounce it. I desire what I do not desire and renounce what I do not have. I can be neither nothing nor everything: I’m just the bridge between what I do not have and what I do not want.
Parque das Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Landscape architecture by Francisco Caldeira Cabral (1908-1992): photo by Manuel Silveira Ramos, 2003 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)
To cease, to be unknown and external, the stirring of branches in remote avenues, the tenuous falling of leaves that one senses without hearing them fall, the subtle sea of distant fountains, and the whole indistinct world of gardens at night, lost in endless complexities, the natural labyrinths of the dark!
To cease, to end once and for all, yet to survive in another form, as the page of a book, a loose lock of hair, a swaying creeper outside a half-open window, insignificant footsteps on the fine gravel curve of a path, the last twist of smoke high above a village as it falls asleep, the idle whip of the waggoner stopped by the road in the morning... Absurdity, confusion, extinction -- anything but life...
Parque das Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Landscape architecture by Francisco Caldeira Cabral (1908-1992): photo by Manuel Silveira Ramos, 2003 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)
Every day things happen in the world that can’t be explained by any law of things we know. Every day they’re mentioned and forgotten, and the same mystery that brought them takes them away, transforming their secret into oblivion.
Such is the law by which things that can’t be explained must be forgotten. The visible world goes on as usual in the broad daylight. Otherness watches us from the shadows.
Knowing clearly that who we are has nothing to do with us, that what we think or feel is always in translation, that perhaps what we want we never wanted -- to know this every moment, to feel this in every feeling, is not this what it means to be a stranger in one’s own soul, an exile from one’s own feelings?
Parque das Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Landscape architecture by Francisco Caldeira Cabral (1908-1992): photo by Manuel Silveira Ramos, 2003 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)
The most painful feelings, the most piercing emotions are also the most absurd ones -- the longing for impossible things precisely because they are impossible, the nostalgia for what never was, the desire for what might have been, one's bitterness that one is not someone else, or one's dissatisfaction with the very existence of the world.
I don't know if these feelings are some slow madness brought on by hopelessness, if they are recollections of some other world in which we've lived -- confused, jumbled memories, like things glimpsed in dreams, absurd as we see them now but not in their origin if we but knew what that was. I don't know if we once were other beings, whose greater completeness we sense only incompletely today, being mere shadows of what they were, beings that have lost their solidity in our feeble two-dimensional imaginings of them amongst the shadows we inhabit.
The impossibility of imagining something they might correspond to, the impossibility of finding some substitute for what in visions they embrace, all this weighs on one like a judgement given one knows not where, by whom, or why.
I don't know if these feelings are some slow madness brought on by hopelessness, if they are recollections of some other world in which we've lived -- confused, jumbled memories, like things glimpsed in dreams, absurd as we see them now but not in their origin if we but knew what that was. I don't know if we once were other beings, whose greater completeness we sense only incompletely today, being mere shadows of what they were, beings that have lost their solidity in our feeble two-dimensional imaginings of them amongst the shadows we inhabit.
The impossibility of imagining something they might correspond to, the impossibility of finding some substitute for what in visions they embrace, all this weighs on one like a judgement given one knows not where, by whom, or why.
Parque das Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Landscape architecture by Francisco Caldeira Cabral (1908-1992): photo by Manuel Silveira Ramos, 2003 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)
Everyone everywhere has always treated me kindly. Very few people, I think, have had so few raise their voice against them, or been so little frowned at, so infrequently the object of someone else's arrogance or irritability. But the kindness with which I was treated was always devoid of affection. For those who would naturally be closest to me, I was always a guest who, as such, was well treated but only with the attentiveness due to a stranger and the lack of affection which is the lot of the intruder.
I'm sure that all this, I mean other people's attitudes towards me, lies principally in some obscure intrinsic flaw in my own temperament. Perhaps I communicate a coldness that unwittingly obliges others to reflect back my own lack of feeling.
I get to know people quickly. It doesn't take long for people to grow to like me. But I never gain their affection. I've never experienced devotion. To be loved has always seemed to me an impossibility, as unlikely as a complete stranger suddenly addressing me as familiarly as 'tu' [Portuguese. Familiar second-person pronoun].
I don't know if this makes me suffer or if I simply accept it as my indifferent fate, and to which questions of suffering or acceptance do not enter.
I always wanted to please. It always hurt me that people should be indifferent towards me. As an orphan of Fortune I have, like all orphans, a need to be the object of someone's affection. I've always been starved of the realization of that need. I've grown so accustomed to this vain hunger that, at times, I'm not even sure I still feel the need to eat.
With or without it life still hurts me.
Others have someone who is devoted to them. I've never had anyone who even considered devoting themselves to me. That is for others: me, they just treat decently.
I recognize in myself the capacity to arouse respect but not affection. Unfortunately I've done nothing that in itself justifies that initial respect and so no one has ever managed fully to respect me either.
I sometimes think that I enjoy suffering. But the truth is I would prefer something else.
Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935): from The Book of Disquiet(O Livro do Desassossego), first published in Portuguese 1982, English translation by Margaret Jull Costa, 1991
Parque das Caldas da Rainha, Portugal. Landscape architecture by Francisco Caldeira Cabral (1908-1992): photo by Manuel Silveira Ramos. 2003 (Biblioteca de Arte / Art Library Fundaçao Calouste Gulbenkian)