Your ships, Lord, didn't make a greater voyage than the one made by my thought, in the disaster of this book. They rounded no cape and sighted no far-flung beach - beyond what daring men had dared and what minds had dreamed - to equal the capes I rounded with my imagination and the beaches where I land with my . . .
Thanks to your initiative, Lord, the Real World was discovered. The Intellectual World will be discovered thanks to mine.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 125
OK, so I chose this passage for reasons beyond the phrase "in the distance of this book," although that seemed to be the appropriate follow-up to the point I made in my previous post about all the reading I've been doing lately and whether or not it was, on some level, a desire to not spend more time writing (I write every day, but I could certainly write more). Recently I stopped taking the prescription for the pain and weariness in my legs (the third of three different ones I've been on over the last three and a half years) because it was making me fat but also intellectually lethargic. I think of how much I was writing before I went on the drugs in the spring of 2021 and how little I wrote for the couple years after. Essentially, I think that the drugs were making me sluggish, both physically and intellectually; I could feel it in class, but especially while trying to write. In the end I decided that I'd rather deal with more pain if it meant that I could have a greater sense of intellectual acuity. I have lots of time to suffer as I get older, but i feel that I'm running out of time to write.
Hah, that's funny. After starting off saying that I didn't choose that passage because of writing and the "disaster of this book" but apparently I did choose the passage for that reason. However, there's obviously more going on. It definitely is a testament to Pessoa's intense internality. No external world or discovery could compare to their internal equivalents. And not to be too Platonic, but isn't he right?
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