Exiled From All Hearts

 Time! The past! Something - a voice, a song, a chance fragrance - lifts the curtain of my soul's memories . . . That which I was an will never again be! That which I had and will never again have! The dead! The dead who loved me in my childhood. Whenever I remember them, my whole soul shivers and I feel exiled from all hearts, alone in the night of myself, weeping like a beggar before the closed silence of all doors.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 197

Now here's an appropriate Pessoa passage that speaks to a monumental birthday, the turning the year, and the aftermath of the passing of my father. Truthfully, I shouldn't be blogging, as class starts on Monday and I'm in the midst of a massive (and ill-timed, if not ill-considered) redesign of my COR 204 class. If I had just left things alone, I would have had a semester wherein I only had two class preps, and they would have been classes I had taught previously - and that never, ever happens in the Core division. In the last couple years I've typically had four classes tied to three different preps, or four classes tied to four different preps, or five classes tied to three different preps, keeping in mind that none of them are actually in my own discipline. So, of course, after receiving this bounty, what do I do? Simple, change one of the courses. That said, I get bored, and I live for challenges, so while my COR 204 will still be a film-based class, it will not "simply" be Marxism and the Movies, but more a class on, as I as spell it out at the top of (yet uncompleted) syllabus: Self, Identify, Film - and a Little Fernando Pessoa. Why do I do these things? Well, again, I get bored if I don't challenge myself, and the more energized I am the more I have to give to the students. Plus, I'd made a promise to myself to use Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet in a class before i retired -  and, as Barbara Stanwyck reminds us in Christmas in Connecticut, "You know, Felix, it's important to keep promises, especially to yourself." This is all by way to saying that I was not goofing off (at least not completely) because I was working my way through The Book of Disquiet (a happily endless process) as I try to put the finishing touches on this mad class, which I described to my friend Erik as either "award-winning or career ending."

OK, so why is this the perfect passage for this particular period in time? Mainly, I suppose, he's talking about the past, and what season is more steeped in the past than the holiday seasons and the end of the year? There's a reason why there are always spirits in all of Dickens's Christmas stories. On the surface, this passage reads almost Proustian, with the exception, I would argue, of one pretty huge difference. Proust is delving into the past to make a connection, to, as I proposed in a talk last year, to bring himself back to that moment at the beginning of the book where he was hoping that his mother would leave her party to kiss him goodnight - and she did come back to read him stories and spent the night sleeping in his room - that moment of perfect union and innocence and bliss, for which he then devotes 3700 pages in trying to recover. I think Pessoa's view of the past is exactly the opposite here. The past simply reminds him of what he will never have again: "Whenever I remember them, my whole soul shivers and I feel exiled from all hearts, alone in the night of myself, weeping like a beggar before the closed silence of all doors." While Pessoa bemoans, "That which I had and will never again have!," I think I, personally, would take it a step further. For Pessoa those doors are now closed, but when I remember my childhood I think that they were always closed. As I've pointed out before, I remember a very different childhood and home than my brother and sisters do, while also fully accepting that a goodly portion of that disconnect, of that closing of the doors, was my own doing.