Freedom Is the Possibility of Isolation

 Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not having to seek them out for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can't live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you're a noble slave or an intelligent servant, but you're not free. And you can't hold this up as your own tragedy, for your birth is a tragedy of Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life itself so oppresses you that you're forced to become a slave. Hapless you are if, having been born free, with the capacity to be isolated and self-sufficient, poverty should force you to live with others. This tragedy, yes, is your own and it follows you.

Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet, ch. 283

It's very easy to see Fernando Pessoa is just a very odd man, and, well, truthfully, he was a very odd man. He created dozens of heteronyms, the poets of which wrote in distinctly different styles. His greatest prose book sat in a trunk for decades before scholars began to put the different pieces together, which is why one publication of The Book of Disquiet can be completely different than another one. The Book of Disquiet is subtitled, A Factless Biography, so even when he's sharing who he is it would probably be better to say that he's sharing who he might be. He never married nor had a serious relationship not even, apparently, even had sex with anyone. So, yes, he was odd, but maybe it's better to recognize that he was also free. I've been reading a massive biography of Marcel Proust (although it's not as massive as Zenith's biography of Fernando Pessoa) and one of the topics that came up is the difference between loneliness and solitude, which are simply not the same thing. I've had more than one person propose that I'm a good friend and that I work really hard on my friendships, but I also crave my time alone. I love my time with my friends, but I don't think I ever get lonely. Of course, in comparison to Pessoa I'm an emotionally needy extrovert.  Pessoa apparently had many friends and quite actively worked to get them published as well, but he disappeared into himself quite frequently (and The Book of Disquiet is a celebration of the latter instinct). I think Pessoa lived the life he wanted to live and he seems to have had no regrets at the end, which meant that he did achieve a level of freedom that most of us can't imagine.