I've undertaken every project imaginable. The Iliad composed by me had a structural logic in its organic linking of epodes such as Homer could never have achieved. The meticulous perfection of my unwritten verses makes Virgil's precision look sloppy and Milton's power slack. My allegorical satires surpassed all of Swift's in the symbolic exactitude of their rigorously interconnected particular. How many Horaces I've been?
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Text 290
First off, obviously, I swiped this reference to Homer and Virgil for the epics book. It will live happily in the Conclusion, or maybe the Introduction, but either place it will shine even brighter cause of the dullness of my own prose. Pessoa is not talking smack here, but rather regretting the books that he never wrote. This may be the only thing that Fernando Pessoa I have in common: an inability to finish projects. Except, sadly, I make FP look energetic and focused by comparison. Why can't I finish my projects? They are queued up, one after the other, and sometimes I tell myself that maybe I shouldn't be that terrified by retirement because I'll finally be able to move on to a different and more profitable (intellectually if not financially) stage of my life. I could champion my lack of intelligence and talent, and this is unquestionably true. Or it could be a testament to my general laziness (while growing up, and I'm sure now, my father opined that I was the laziest man in the world), and there's truth in that. In the end, however, I suspect it's cowardice as much as anything.
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