Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Calvary and calvary

 If one day I succeed in carrying the cross of my intention to the good Calvary, I'll find another calvary on that good Calvary, and I'll miss the time when I was futile, mediocre and imperfect. I will in some sense be less.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, Ch. 180

I suppose I should have included this passage in the earlier post from chapter 180, but for some reason I thought it deserved its own space. Why would the other calvary be both less and greater than the final Calvary? In some ways I guess because we were still in some ways still evolving, still experiencing life in an earlier imperfect, but also purer, sense. We will not be undergoing the beauty of living that life for the first time. It's like that passage from The Book of Disquiet where Pessoa laments that he'll never get to read The Pickwick Papers for the first time again.


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