Metallic Age of Barbarians

 "In this metallic age of barbarians, only a relentless cultivation of our own ability to dream, to analyze and to captivate can prevent our personality from degenerating into nothing or else into a personality like all the rest."

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 369

Every time I think I can't love Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet more I turn another page, and, well, love it more. It still amazes me that I made it to age sixty-two without reading The Book of Disquiet. I'm definitely going to teach a class centered around Pessoa, both the book itself and his poetry (and that of his heteronyms). His desire to dream, to pursue a pure internal life, in opposition to "this metallic age of barbarians," seems even more important now than he wrote these words nearly a century ago. The last two and a half year of physical decline have left me tired and frustrated, but maybe my shrinking physical world is not necessarily a terrible thing if it allows me to delve more clearly and cleanly into my own internal world, my own dreams.