The Size of What I See

    From my village I see as much of the universe as can be seen from the earth,

    And so my village is as large as any town,

    For I am the size of what I see

    And not the size of my height . . .

                                 Fernando Pessoa (as Alberto Caeiro)

OK, so this is not actually drawn from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, but I'm still using the Disquiet tag. While Pessoa used over fifty heteronyms in his writing Alberto Caeiro was one of the holy trilogy along with Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos. This is what led Richard Zenith, the most popular translator of Pessoa (I'm quoting from his A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe collection) to propose that the four important 20th century Portuguese poets were Fernando Pessoa. I guess this jumped out at me because, as one can tell from the desultory mood of a previous post, I'm struggling with a decreasing universe; essentially, if I'm the size of what I can see I'm clearly losing height. In her Persons & Portraits Cynthia Freeland discussed the four selves, with one of them being the Bodily Self, meaning that our manufactured selves are based on different experiential identities and one of them is our existence as physical beings. Yes, I know that if I'm forced to retire I could still devote myself to writing and, and least theoretically, still see a vast and fathomless universe, and thus I would be as tall as Hanuman as he jumped across the Indian Ocean to Lanka, but I'm having trouble getting to that point.