I Must Be Someone

 I live aesthetically as someone else. I've sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that's foreign to my being. Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognize myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don't know. I must be someone. and if I avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it's so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personality. I want to be exactly like what I wanted to be and am not. If I were to give in to life, I'd be destroyed. I want to be a work of of art, at least in my soul, since I can't be one in my body. That's why I've sculpted myself in quiet isolation and have placed myself in a hothouse, cut off from fresh air and direct light - where the absurd flower of my artificiality can blossom in secluded beauty.

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 114

Tomorrow, as I think I mentioned a couple days ago, I'm going to keep a promise to myself and include Pessoa's the Book of Disquiet in a course. I reworked my Marxism and the Movies class, to focus instead on self and identity and film - and a fair bit of Fernando Pessoa. OK, so it makes sense to me, and in the end that's all that matters. I always give my students, especially my juniors, a crazy amount of options on their final assignments, because, as I tell them quite frequently, if they are excited about a paper they're simply much more likely to write a good one. Similarly, one of the reasons why I. even at this late date in my teaching career keep creating new courses, is because if I'm excited and learning new things then the class is simply going to probably end up being a lot better. With that in mind, Pessoa, and especially this particular passage, speak to this moment in time. One life is ending, and I'm not the time to putter around the house leading some dim echo of my last life. Rather, I hope to create myself, because, well, "I must be someone." Once again, teaching serves as therapy (although, sadly not for my long-suffering students).