A Letter Not to Post

 A Letter Not to Post

I hereby excuse you from appearing in my idea of you.

Your life . . .

    This is not my love; it's merely your life.

I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation in possessing it.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 347

I will often opine that if you want to understand how not to have a happy relationship you should delve into Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Following that logic, if you want to master the art of not even having a woman in your life at all you should delve into Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet. We pretty definitely know that Fernando Pessoa never had sex with any woman in his entire life, although he did have one vague girlfriend who he kissed a couple times on a tram. Why? Well, it could simply be that he was a monumental weirdo. It's sort of the same argument that one ends up chasing around when you try and figure out the concept of his heteronyms; was he making a profound point about identity, or was he just being almost unimaginably odd. I would argue that in regards to the question of love - or the lack of love, the passage above helps things come more into focus. That last line, "I love you the way I love the sunset or the moonlight: I want the moment to remain, but all I want to possess in it is the sensation in possessing it," is classic Pessoa. It is easy to think of Proust as being intensely internal, which he is, but he's almost an extrovert as compared to Pessoa. What he wants is a quiet, internal life, shielded from the ugliness, the crassness, of modern life. Maybe this is his problem with any sort of relationship with a woman: he wants the beauty of the concept of it - to possess the "sensation in possessing it" - but not the ugliness of possessing it. At least he's honest: "This is not my love; it's merely your life."