The Height of Spiritual Torture and Humiliation

 One of the soul's great tragedies is to execute a work and then realize, once it's finished that it's not any good. The tragedy is especially great when one realizes that the work is the best he could have done. But to write a work, knowing beforehand that it's bound to be flawed and imperfect; to see while writing it that it's flawed and imperfect - this is the height of spiritual torture and humiliation.

Fernando Pessoa The Book of Disquiet, document 231

This probably popped into my head because I've managed to get in no meaningful writing lately. I wrote so much over the summer, and maybe that's why I had that totally unrealistic goal of finishing the epics book before the summer ended - that is, once the school year began I knew that my time would shrink to nothing and my meaningful output would be even less. Of course, what Pessoa is getting out is something even more profound: why do I bother when I know it won't be any good anyway? He answers the question in the next paragraph: "So why do I keep writing? Because I still haven't learned to practice completely the renunciation that I preach." He reflects that the first poems he wrote as a child were perfect, or at least they seemed perfect to him at the time. Pessoa laments that, "I'll never again be able to have the illusory pleasure of producing perfect work." How delicious and necessary is that "illusory pleasure." He reflects, "I weep over those first dreadful poems as over a dead child, a dead son, a last hope that has vanished." I don't think I've even earned that "illusory pleasure," because what have I ever created that amounted to anything? I can't even pretend that it amounted to perfection, because, like Oakland, there's no there, there.