Pure Ascetic

 The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic - these three are happy in life, for these three types of men all renounce their personalities: one because he lives by instinct, which is impersonal, another because he lives by the imagination, which is forgetting, and the third because he doesn't live but merely (since he still hasn't died) sleeps.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 232

Truthfully, I don't know if I've actually processed all of this passage yet, but, like so much of Pessoa, I think he's giving me the tools to arrive at a deeper understanding. Maybe I'm just drawn to this because I've moved into the wilderness and I see myself in all three of these categories. Earlier in this chapter Pessoa notes, "Happy the man who doesn't ask for more than what life spontaneously gives him, being guided by the instinct of cats, which seek sunlight when there's sun, and when there's no sun then heat, wherever they find it." One of the reasons why I think I've been so unhappy during so much of my life - or at least much less happy than I should have been - is that I consistently over-thought everything, not necessarily because I've been too intellectual (because, well, I think we know that's not true) but because I felt that I was supposed to over-think everything, that somehow that gave me an intellectual bona fides that growing up in southern Indiana didn't provide. I used to opine that Graceland made sense once you visited Elvis's childhood home in Tupelo, Mississippi. Maybe the emotional carnage of so much of my life makes sense because of my own stunted intellectual/emotional youth. From now on, I'm following the example of the cats.