An Armour of Realities

 The truly wise man is the one who can keep external events from changing him in any way. To do this, he covers himself with an armour of realities closer to him than the world's facts and through which the facts, modified accordingly, reach him.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, no. 97

I've commented, repeatedly, about the fact that one of the things that I love about Pessoa is his internality, and his recognition of the essential importance of defending ourselves from the crass, cold, and artificial outside world. When I get up in the way too early morning - I'm one of those people who is usually up before the alarm buzzes at 5:03 a.m. - I grab coffee, make room for our cat Mollie on my lap, and begin to peruse the news (eventually I transition into working on Portuguese and then writing). What has increasingly amazed/saddened me is the amount of time that the pseudo-news and social media devotes to trying to convince me to care about certain things, usually celebrities or this year's non-trauma (usually a white person being inconvenienced). It's so easy to get drawn into this nonsense, and almost impossible to avoid it. This is one of the biggest reasons why, in the space of a couple weeks, I dropped off of Instagram, Facebook, and finally even Twitter (which I used to love before Musk turned it into a right wing hellscape). It's like the soul is a baby animal that has to be lovingly protected against a violent world. When Pessoa discusses "an armour of realities closer to him than the world' facts" I don't think he's talking about ignoring the world, but instead constantly considering what the world tells us we should care about. Most of the time those are no more truly "real" than childish hobgoblins.