My Dear Vegetables

 I loathe the happiness of all these people who don't know they're unhappy. Their human life is full of what, in a true sensibility, would produce a surfeit of anxieties. But since their true life is vegetative, their sufferings come and go without touching their soul, and they live a life that can be compared only to that of a man with a toothache who won a fortune - the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, for it is the gift of being like them, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and pain.

That's why, in spite of everything, I love them all. My dear vegetables!

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 313

FP - "the genuine good fortune of living unawares, the greatest gift granted by the gods, superior just as they are (albeit in a different fashion) to happiness and  pain."  How long have humans tried to live lives equal to that of the gods? The answer is exactly how long the gods have punished them for wanting exactly that. Yahweh tossed Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden for eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the crime of essentially trying to rival God. However, in the end, at least according to Pessoa, we were trying too hard. the truth is not a studied Stoic or Buddhist transcendence, but instead a witless "living unawares." Of course, are they actually living? Way too many people - apparently around 46% of the adult US population - are apparently living, and voting, vegetatively. 

Shanks and Cutlets of Destiny

 I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I've seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And 'flesh and blood' in fact describes them rather well: they're like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher's, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 317

OK, first off I should just go ahead and admit that one of my fantasy baseball team is going to be retitled Shanks and Cutlets of Destiny of next year. In the Irrational League, which I helped found thirty-five years ago, my team is a bottom dweller season after season, mainly because I just don't pay much attention to baseball any more. I'm hanging around in the league mainly to be supportive of my friends. Consequently, I tend to swap out the names pretty routinely now, mainly to preserve the sanctity of the Atlanta Crackers - my original team name, and one in which I won a lot. My gross incompetence now besmirches the legacy of that proud name, and I rotate in and out of other names And, seriously, who could not root for the Shanks and Cutlets of Destiny.

More importantly, Pessoa is, once again, discussing his love of the world of literature and art, where true reality resides, and his mistrust of the coarse physical world that surrounds us. Yes, he's being more than a bit of over the top, but he's correct in recognizing that what we think is important is often anything but. Not that family and friends aren't important, obviously, and he was loyal to both, but instead that we place so much importance on people who are of absolutely no importance whatsoever. What's more, our society - now more than then - focus our attention, endlessly, on the "famous" and "interesting" at the expense of truly meaningful. Is it any wonder that we live in the age of Donald Trump?

My Constant Helper

 When I moved into the cabin I assumed that Cici (aka Nut Job aka the Vertical Cat) would be my boon companion, but it turned out to be Mollie. It might just be an issue of scheduling in that Cici makes it to Janet's lap first in the morning, and Mollie uses me as a fallback. However, she's usually up here at my desk, lounging on one of my prayer rugs, when she's not trying to knock my laptop to the ground because I have the temerity to try and write when she needs/demands attention.

The work session blew up pretty quickly when Mollie heard a bird outside and just about leapt to her death trying to climb out the window.

An Interconnected Series of Dreams and Novels

 I've often noticed that certain fictional characters assume a prominence never attained by the friends and acquaintances who talk and listen to us in visible, real life. And this make me fantasize about whether everything in the sum total of the world might not be an interconnected series of dreams and novels, like little boxes inside larger boxes that are inside yet larger ones, everything being a story made up of stories, like A Thousand and One Nights, unreally taking place in the never-ending night.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 285

As we've discussed, to understand Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet you really need to grasp his ceaseless and beautiful interiority. I think you also need to understand that, in a lot of ways, Pessoa is not quite certain that the external world exists. By this I don't mean in a surface-level and fairly witless Matrix version, but rather that the external world is so unimportant that it essentially doesn't exist. It's crass and it's ugly, but it's also so pointlessly bereft of meaning that it has no tangibility, intellectually or emotionally or philosophically or spiritually. Hence, when Pessoa identifies The Book of Disquiet as "a factless autobiography" he's not simply being typically weird, he's making a far more profound point. One of the reasons why biographies or autobiographies can be so unsatisfying and unproductive is because a listing of things that you did doesn't really tell me anything about you. I'm hoping to teach a class centered around The Book of Disquiet in the spring, and I'm going to start off by asking the students to write a couple pages autobiography, which I'll, utterly predictably, gently mock in class, following up on the point above that a chronicle of jobs you had or places you visited doesn't actually tell the reader much of anything about the subject. Of course, this also relates to the previous post about my growing sense of fear that I won't end up moving to Portugal, because, after all, the Ganges does run by the Rua dos Douradores. Would a new external existence in Portugal actually change anything, unless, of course, it helped me change myself internally.  With all this in mind, I think you could see why Pessoa proposes "an interconnected series of dreams and novels." If the external world is so gossamer fleeting in its significance, then the characters in a novel probably are more important than most of the people in my "actual" life.

A Partial Death

 Today, in one of the pointless and worthless daydreams that constitute a large part of my inner life, I imagined being forever free from the Rua dos Douradores, from Vasques my boss, from Moreira the head bookkeeper, from all the employees, from the delivery boy, the office boy and the cat. In my dream I experienced freedom, as if the South Seas had offered me marvelous islands to be discovered. It would all be repose, artistic achievements, the intellectual fulfilments of my being.

But even as I was imagining this, during my miniature midday holiday in a café, an unpleasant thought assaulted my dram: I realized I would feel regret. Yes, I say it as if confronted by the actual circumstance: I would feel regret. Vasques my boss, Moreira the head bookkeeper, Borges the cashier, all the young men, the cheerful boy who takes letters t the post office, the boy who makes deliveries, the gentle cat - all this has become part of my life. And I wouldn't be able to leave it without crying, without feeling that - like it or not - it was a part of me which would remain with all of them, and that to separate myself from them would be a partial death.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 7

Later in The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa reminds us that, "The Ganges passes by the Rua dos Douradores. All eras exist in this cramped room . . ." (text 420)  Lately, I've been thinking a lot about these two passages. Maybe it's becoming obvious to me that maybe I won't ever move to Portugal after I retire. It could be something as quotidian as my health: now that the Mayo Clinic has rejected my request for an appointment am I just going to slowly lose the ability to walk (or at least walk more than fifty yards) - and are my current heart problems going to be more than just a temporary annoyance and turn into something more truly dangerous or debilitating? Or maybe I'll just lose my courage (not that the previous issues doesn't impact this one) and I can't rally myself to face the challenge. Or, maybe, I'm starting to realize that I would miss this life, even my versions of Vasques and Moreira and the office boy.

Japanese Teacups

 "When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the the curves of the porcelain [missing text here]. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun. To know this (and with what precision I know it!) is to have gone beyond modern science."

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 416

I'm sure I shared the bizarre story of the time when I was in Omaha, Nebraska for a conference, which had to be something like thirty years ago. I was coming back from dinner when I found myself in front of an antique shop. Featured in the window were a couple old suitcases, sort of like the one that George Bailey received as a gift from Mr. Gower in It's a Wonderful Life. I remember feeling so sad, and it just seemed so unfair that suitcases which might have circled the globe were ending their days on a neglected side street in Omaha, Nebraska. At that moment an incredible desire came over me to smash the window of the shop and free the suitcases. Our ability, or at least my ability, to animate the inanimate - and probably inanimate the animate - never ceases to amaze me.

Meticulous Perfection of My Unwritten Verses

 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.