To Live Everything Through Novels

 My ideal would be to live everything through novels and to use real life for resting up - to read my emotions and to live my disdain of them. For someone with a keen and sensitive imagination, the adventures of a dictional protagonist are genuine emotion enough, and more, since they are experienced by us as well as the protagonist. No great romantic adventure exists than to have loved Lady Macbeth with true and directly felt love. After a love like that, what can one do but take a rest, not loving anyone in the real world?

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 348

And continuing our discussion of why Pessoa never had a lover in "the real world," we come to this brilliant passage. I think in one of my way too many passages about Proust when I devoted over seven-hundred consecutive days to discussing Remembrance of Things Past I spent time talking about women in films or literature that I felt I could settle down with quite happily. Naturally, in an almost Proustian way, I'm brought back to that memory.  It's funny, the older I get the more I narrow down my list of readings (not that I don't read a lot of new stuff as well) and am even more likely to reread a novel that I loved. I'm in the process of finishing my fourth reading of Remembrance of Things Past (more on that soon), which I'm sure, in today's world, would be all the justification one would need to be sent to a mental institute. However, in an increasingly ugly world - and this is a viewpoint worthy of Pessoa - the draw to a beautiful literary world is almost magnetic. How could anyone in the "real world" compare to his love for Lady Madbeth? And hence why bother? Does this statement actually apply to me as well, and it's why I'm drawn so passionately to The Book of Disquiet? Have I actually been a bad partner to the various women in my life because, as my Dad would frequently opine, I was never really there?