Except in Dreams

 Inaction makes up for everything. Not acting gives us everything. To imagine is everything, as long as it doesn't tend towards action. No one can be king of the world except in dreams. And every one of us who really knows himself wants to be king of the world.

To imagine, without being, is the throne. To desire, without wanting, is the crown. We have what we renounce, for we conserve it eternally intact in our dreams, by the light of the sun that isn't, or of the moon that cannot be.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 164

Following this logic, I should already be king of the world. As I've no doubt discussed, my father raised me to believe that I was the laziest boy and then man in the history of the world. Maybe this is just the nature of fathers and sons, as part of the process of self-deception that makes us, as adults, seem to be more important by dog-piling on the perceived shortcomings of the next generation. Still, I think Pessoa was aiming at something more profound here, obviously. It's part of the call for a greater internality that made up so much of his thought - and which appeals to me in the face of an avalanche of crass commercialism and intentional cruelty that seems to make up the modern world. I've never really read anything at Pessoa and Daoism, but there are certainly times when his thought almost seems Daoist. I think the difference is that the key to him is control, which you only maintain internally, in dreams.