Metaphysically Glib

 All my life I've been metaphysically glib, serious at playing around. I haven't done anything seriously, however much I may have wanted to. A mischievous Destiny had fun with me.

To have emotions made of chintz, or of silk, or of brocade! To have emotions that could be described like that! To have describable emotions!

I feel in my soul a divine regret for everything, a choked and sobbing grief for the condemnation of dreams in the flesh of those who dreamed them. And I hate without hatred all the poets who wrote verses, all the idealists who saw their ideals take shape,  all those who obtained what they wanted.

I haphazardly roam the calm streets, walking until my body is as tired as my soul, grieved to the point of that old and familiar grief that likes to e felt, pitying itself with an indefinable maternal compassion set to music.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, no. 135

When I think about Pessoa - and I think about Pessoa a lot (I told my sister yesterday that The Book of Disquiet is the book of my 60s - what really hits home with me is what a fragile, damaged, soul he was. And by this I don't mean to simply fall back on the tortured artist trope. Rather, I think Pessoa was a person who was horrified by the crass, artificial, commercial, cold world around him. There is, as I've pointed out previously, a beautiful internality to his writing. Pessoa wrote an extraordinary amount, very little of which found its way into publication during his own lifetime. In his writings in general, and specifically in this passage, you clearly get the sense of his frustration with himself. When he says, "I hate without hatred all the poets who wrote verses," he's turning the lens on himself more on them. So, why didn't he publish more in his own lifetime? In the end I think he couldn't handle the grief of handing over his work to that brutal external world that he abhorred so completely. If he didn't publish it, if it remained locked up in that infamous wooden chest, then not only did he still possess it entirely, he also assured that it was protected, safe in a womb, far away from the brutality of the world.