Alone During Playtime

 God created me to be a child and willed that I remain a child. But why did he let Life beat me up, take away my toys and leave me alone during playtime, my weak hands clutching at my blue, tear-stained smock? If I couldn't live without loving care, why was this thrown out with the rubbish? Ah, every time I see a child crying in the street, left there on his own, the jolting horror of my exhausted heart grieves me even more than the child's sadness. I grieve with every pore of my emotional life, and it is my hands that wring the corner of the child's smock, my mouth that is contorted by read tears, my weakness, my loneliness . . . And all the laughs from the adult life passing by are like the flames of match struck against the sensitive fabric of my heart.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 407

As I've discussed, I think I failed in my first attempt to read The Book of Disquiet. Essentially, I didn't understand what he was trying to do - and trying to say. There are definitely passages where Pessoa simply reads as merely mopey (a sort of pre-Goth Goth) but hang in there, because you eventually discover a remarkably tender and wounded heart, in addition to a profound commentator on the human condition. Maybe the passage above is somewhere in between. It clearly reveals his pain, but he can't help pointing out that when he sees the suffering child in the street "my exhausted heart grieves me even more than the child's sadness." The problem with the extreme interiorization of a writer/thinker like Pessoa is that sometimes you can't climb out of that interior. You're making contact with the rest of the world, but their suffering can serve mainly as a bridge to your own - as compared to your own suffering forming a bridge to the suffering of the world.

Obviously, this would be a good place to include a link to Young's I Am A Child.