This dreadful hour when I shrink to being possible or rise to mortality. If only the morning wouldn't dawn. If only I and this alcove and its interior atmosphere where I belong could all be spiritualized into Night, absolutized into Darkness, so that not so much as a shadow of me would remain that could taint, with my memory, whatever lived on.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 185
This passage from Pessoa seems to fit the mood I'm in, and the terrible liminality that haunts me.
"No empire justifies breaking a child's doll. No ideal is worth the sacrifice of a toy train."
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 454
I think these lines jumped out at me because of the Vermont Public Philosophy Week talk that I gave a couple weeks ago, but also because of the Trumpian horror story that we're living through. My talk focused on Thucydides, especially his Melian Dialogue and how power and empire negatively impacted the Athenians. Many Greeks at the time thought that the Athenian slaughter of the Melians cursed them, but Thucydides wasn't willing to go that far. However, he did make it clear that endless war and aggression and ambition would corrupt human nature. I keep watching these news reports which complain that Trump's unlawful war on Iran was driving up gas prices and how this aggravated people. Somehow, the price at the pump is more important than bombing a girls' school and killing over a hundred children. This is exactly what Thucydides was warning us against. I'm now sixty-six, and it seems like that for my entire life the US has been at war, almost universally punching down at weaker countries. It has so corrupted our soul that we can no longer feel, let alone realize that we have become the bad guys.
Nostalgia! I even feel it for people and things that were nothing to me, because time's fleeing is for me an anguish, and life's mystery is a torture. Faces I habitually see on my habitual streets - if I stop seeing them I become sad. And they were nothing to me, except perhaps the symbol of all of life.
The nondescript old man, with dirty gaiters who often crossed my path at nine-thirty in the morning . . . The crippled seller of lottery tickets who would pester me in vain . . . The round and ruddy old man smoking a cigar at the door of the tobacco shop . . . The pale tobacco shop owner . . . What has happened to them all, who because I regularly saw them were a part of my life? Tomorrow I woo will vanish from Rua da Prata, the Rua dos Douradoes, the Rua dos Fanqueiros. Tomorrow I too - I this soul that feels and thinks, this universe I am for myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be the one who no longer walks these streets, whom others will vaguely evoke with a 'What's become of him?' And everything I've done, everything I've felt and everything I've lived will amount merely to one less passer-by on the everyday streets of some city or other.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 481
These are the last two paragraphs of The Book of Disquiet, or at least Richard Zenith's interpretation of what constitutes the core of The Book of Disquiet. As I discussed previously, I'm trying to finish my paper for the upcoming conference in Lisbon, so I've been spending a lot of time in writing by and about Fernando Pessoa. Considering where I am in my career - and life - it's not surprising that this passage would jump out at me so meaningfully; I mean, The Book of Disquiet - and "this universe I am for myself" - both have to end. I'm sure that this feeling is what made it so relatively easy to decide to head over to Ramallah for Mahmoud's wedding. I remember when I left Georgia Perimeter College (it's hard to believe I taught there for nine years) the provost, who was very nice, told me that I'd be missed and if I wanted to come back I'd be welcomed with open arms. Obviously, it's not true (even if it was a sweet thing to say), not simply because full-time positions require a national search, but also because no one is so important that they won't be forgotten in a year or less. One of the reasons why I want to walk away from Champlain without any fuss, essentially disappearing like a ghost, is because I don't want to go through the hypocrisy of pretending that anyone will actually miss me - or even remember that I taught there in no time at all.
I weep over my imperfect pages, but if future generations read them, they will be more touched by my weeping than by any perfection I might have achieved, since perfection would have kept me from weeping and, therefore, from writing. Perfection never materializes. The saint weeps, and is human, God is silent. That is why we can love the saint but cannot love God.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 64
I'm trying to put the finishing touches on the paper for the upcoming conference in Lisbon, which has me inundated in various works by and about Fernando Pessoa. Of course, this also is distracting me from the epics book, which makes perfect sense because I chose Pessoa as the subject for a couple presentations simply to try and kickstart my writing; as the old saying goes, "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans." Nevertheless "forcing" yourself to reread The Book of Disquiet is never a bad thing, and this passage, already heavily noted from previous reading, jumped out at me again. Now, I'll never achieve perfection in my writing, although at this point I'd settle for something akin to gross competence. This weekend we drove down to see Janet's mom for Mother's Day, and that can always be a challenge. In the end, it, with a couple bumps along the way, went pretty well. On the way home, as part of the inevitable debrief, I proposed that we had all done the best we could, and thinking about it seemed to make Janet very happy. "The saint weeps, and is human. God is silent."
The search for truth - be it the subjective truth of belief, the objective truth of reality, or the social truth of money or power - always confers, on the searcher who merits a prize, the ultimate knowledge of its non-existence. The grand prize of life goes only to those who bought tickets by chance.
The value of art is that it takes us away from here.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 361
It's difficult to look at the world today and not agree with Pessoa's observation that the "grand prize of life goes only to those who bought tickets by chance." And in America, today more than ever, those random tickets are based on inherited wealth. The oligarchs are stripping America economically - and the religious fanatics are stripping America spiritually - and have somehow convinced tens of millions of Americans that the greatest threat they face are trans folks just trying to live their life as best they can. However, does that really mean that the "subjective truth of belief, [and] the objective truth of reality" don't exist at all? This may be Pessoa simply being Pessoa, I guess, although the "truth" of the American dream clearly doesn't seem to exist anymore. If the collective dream is dead, does that mean that the individual dream is dead as well? That's a tougher one. I've talked quite a bit lately about my desire to turn around from the cruel, callous world that we live in, this Trumpian nightmare where empathy is mocked and heartlessness is celebrated. Instead, I've turned inward, even more than usual, and I'm making a deliberate effort to read even more than usual (and that's saying something). As Pessoa opines, "The value of art is that it takes us away from here." However, in doing that are we letting the barbarians win? This brings us back to the New Monastic Individuals concept, and maybe it's enough to try and preserve the best and the most beautiful, culturally and spiritually and intellectually, and just attempt, as best we can, to pass it along to others.
The human soul is so inevitably the victim of pain that it suffers the pain of the painful surprise even with things it should have expected.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 245
Yesterday I was having a chat with a colleague on why our students are so remarkably disinterested this semester. Yes, on the one hand this sounds like a conversation that every professor has had with a colleague since the beginning of time (including my professors about me, doubtless), but on the other hand there is definitely something going on here. In my forty years of teaching I've never experienced a semester where there have been so many absences and late papers and general disinterest. Granted, maybe I've simply, finally, lost it as a professor - or maybe I've grown so old that the consistent ageism of my students (and my colleagues, for that matter) has overwhelmed me. However, I think it's more than that. For decades now the corporate and anti-democratic elements of our country have been attacking expertise. One way to diminish the inconvenient truth of climate change is to shoot the messenger, championing, and somehow equating, the less than one percent of scientists who downplay the danger we're facing. Certainly all professors were hit with shrapnel in that war. Now we've reached the point where the VP is identifying the professors as the enemy. However, I think it's even bigger than that. This generation has had to begin its college and professional careers with the knowledge that they'd probably never be able to buy a house, essentially facing the prospect of having less than the previous generation in the history of the American experiment. Hence, a college education is a more stressful than what I faced, where I wasn't facing crippling debt and could actually just focus on reading great books and discussing great thoughts. We've completely commodified a college education and removed the magic associated with it. But I think it's even bigger than that. With the horror of the Trump administration we're facing an almost existential crisis as a nation, and even though my students are remarkably un-self-aware, they must at least realize that something terrible id brewing. From our side of things we're also suffering a sense of helplessness, and, sliding back up to the top for the Pessoa quote, even though we knew it was going to be a freak show it doesn't make the pain any less debilitating.
I'm presenting at this year's Vermont Public Philosophy Week, as I did last year. It's a program run by Tyler Doggett from UVM, which features talks around the state. It's a wonderful program, and Tyler does a great job bringing it all together, and I'm very happy to support his efforts. I love these community talks, and it's such a positive way to bring folks together to talk about ideas - and, well, it's also just a lot of fun. The entire lineup of talks can be found on their website: publicphilosophyweek.org
Saturday, 5 April, features a doubleheader here in Calais at the Adamant Community Club (1161 Martin Road).
1:00 p.m.
Gary Scudder
"Self Identity and Why Fernando Pessoa Was the Four Best Portuguese Poets"
What is the relationship between our concepts of Self and Identity? One of the most interesting ways to think about this question was provided by Fernando Pessoa, who produced over one-hundred "heteronyms," four of which might be the greatest poets in Portuguese history.
2:30 p.m.
Janet Pocorobba
"Co-ops and the American Myth of the Rugged Individualist"
A readings from a work-in-progress about the Adamant Cooperative Store, which in 2025 marks its 90th year. We'll discuss the realities and myths about community, isolation, and co-ops.
Obviously, I'm the opening act. Get there early when there will be lots of empty seats! It's free to the public, and we (well, Tyler) will provide some treats.
I don't know if it happens only to me or to everyone who, through civilization, has been born a second time. But for me, and perhaps for other people like me, it seems that what's artificial has become natural, and what's natural is now strange. Or rather, it's not that what's artificial has become natural; it's simply that what's natural has changed. I have no use for motor vehicles. I have no use for the products of science - telephones, telegraphs - which make life easy, not for its fanciful by-products - phonographs, radios - which make life amusing for those who are amused by such things.
None of that interests me, none of it appeals. But I love the Tagus because of the big city along its shore.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 50
This week is my COR 204 class I lined up Craig Gillespie's wonderful film Lars and the Real Girl, a brief discussion of Karl Marx's ideas of alienation and reification, and readings like this from Pessoa. The students, at least in my Monday class, stared vapidly at me and went back to looking at their phones. At that moment I could only reflect, "Thank you for proving Marx and Pessoa correct, and for putting an exclamation mark on this evening's lesson plan."
On a happier note, I'll be returning to that big city on the banks of the Tagus in June to present at a conference.
There's a thin sheet of glass between me and life. However clearly I see and understand life, I can't touch it.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 80
This very Pessoan observation feels very true to me at the moment, and it's a decided change from how I've felt for the last fifteen years. It's one of the reasons why I was up for hours in the middle of the night last night, and why I've been haunting the cabin on too many nights lately. I suppose I could relate it to the passing of my father, although I think it's true more symbolically than emotionally. Simply put, we weren't that close to each other. We loved each other, but neither of us ever played a very big role in the other's life, and I'm sure I was just as guilty on that front as he was. So, I don't think I miss him the way my siblings miss him, and that, largely, eliminates the emotional side of my recent struggles. Symbolically, however, well, that's another story. It's an old chestnut, but when both your parents have passed the great wheel of life has spun, and you're next in the queue (and, by simple mathematic logic, if you're the oldest of your generation of siblings that is even more true). As I've proposed on this blog, doubtless far too many times, I'm not worried about dying. I don't waste one moment on any day fretting about my eternal fate - that's just not how I view God. The thought that there's a divine figure adding and subtracting figures from a spectral spreadsheet is both illogical, and I would argue an insult to God. Rather, I think my father's passing has made me think about life's transition points, and, obviously, since I just turned 65, I'm in the midst of one. I've been teaching for over forty years, and even if I weren't struggling with health issues - mainly my lingering and mysterious leg ailments (another visit to my long-suffering doctor yesterday gave me no hope for a medical solution) - I'd also have to admit that I'm just tired. If I'm honest with myself, I just don't think I love teaching anymore, or at least I don't love teaching as much as I used to; even that is conditional, however, mainly because I don't think anyone ever loved teaching as much as I did). You can do many jobs in the wide world quite effectively if you don't love them, but I'm not certain that teaching is one of them. But if I retire, then what? I've defined myself - and measured myself - by my identity as a teacher for over forty years. What am I on the other side?
Let's act like sphinxes, however falsely, until we reach the point of no longer knowing who we are. For we are, in fact, false sphinxes, with no idea of what we are in reality. The only way to be in agreement with life is to disagree with ourselves. Absurdity is divine.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 23
In my COR 204 class this week we're plunging into The Book of Disquiet, which I suspect the students will either love or it will break them. I'm not certain which one I'd prefer. By that I mean that while I would like my students to appreciate Pessoa (this is apparently one of my life goals) I think it might benefit them more to have their untroubled brains shattered, if only so that they can be put back together again. To be clear on this subject, I'm not really interested in putting them back together again: it is for others, hopefully themselves, to carry out that job. That said, they can't begin that process until they're broken down in the first place, which is essentially the point that I think Pessoa is making in the passage above. We can't connect or reconnect until we first disconnect.
But the horror that's destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It's a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire to never have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my body and soul. It's the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?
And then I feel an overwhelming, absurd desire for a king of Satanism before Satan, a desire that one day - a day without time or substance - an escape leading outside of God will be discovered, and our deepest selves will somehow cease participating in being and non-being.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 43
This may seem like an odd posting for Ramadan, but, actually, I think it makes perfect sense for how I approach the month. As I've said, too many times, I think we reduce a month that should be focusing on intense study and self-reflection, and turn it into a competition about who can fast the most hours. It's not that the fasting isn't important, because it teaches us so many things, but if we don't tie it a period of exploration and questioning then I think we're cheapening the beauty of this time set aside from the more quotidian demands of the external world, focusing on what is quantifiable (hours fasted) as compared to what is harder to quantify (study and self-reflection). One of the things that I love about Pessoa is his internality, his quest to find beauty away from the crass, ugly, commercialism of the world that we're forced to live in. It's a world outside of God, at least our commodified vision of God in religion, and because of that it is fully inside of God, the transcendent God beyond being and non-being.
Literature - which is art married to thought, and realization untainted by reality - seems to me the end towards which all human effort would have to strive, if it were truly human and not just a welling up of our animal self. To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. Fields are greener in their description than in their actual greenness. Flowers, if described with phrases that define them in the air of the imagination, will have colours with a durability not found in cellular life.
What moves lives. What is said endures. There's nothing in life that's less real for having been well described.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 27
OK, I'm now taking back my previous comment. This passage from Pessoa just made me very happy, and also helps to explain why I've been reading so much lately. It's not simply hiding away from the world, it's more importantly a conscious and unconscious movement towards the beautiful.
Dolorous Interlude
An object tossed into a corner, a rag that fell on to the road, my contemptible being feigns to the world.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 37
Once again, Pessoa manages to capture my mood. Now, if only he would improve it. I was talking to a good friend yesterday and she asked what to do when you're feeling frustrated with work. She added, and don't tell me to read Pessoa or Proust. I replied that I would never make that suggestion if the goal is to pull yourself out of the blues, although I find them both immeasurably beautiful and safe havens where I increasingly go to hide away from the world. This current dystopian madness is providing few instances for happiness, especially, as I opined the other day, for teachers, because it seems that everything we've tried to do in our career was an abject failure. Having said that, I did give her an answer that I think both Pessoa and Proust would vouchsafe: let's grab lunch or an adult scholarly beverage. The other side of this hellscape is that it's proving to be the golden age of friendships.
I only regret not being a child, since then I could believe in my dreams, and not being a madman, since then I could keep everyone around me from getting close to my soul . . .
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 127
Yesterday I was sitting in my office at school talking to my officemate Erik. I think we were both in a sad mood (or maybe I'm actually meant to move to Portugal because I naturally possess more than my fair share of their famed saudade). It may have been simply because it was a Monday - or maybe it was because our students were wearing us down - or maybe it was because of this Trumpian avalanche of hatred and madness that is burying all of us, but the mood of the discussion was pretty grim. I found myself proposing that what made this time in history so horrible was that we're teachers, and everything about it spoke to the failure of everything we've worked at for years; or, in my case, decades, since I gave my first individual lecture in 1982 and taught my first free-standing class in 1984). Weren't we supposed to teach our students to think, certainly, but also to feel? To understand the world? Is this one of the hallmarks of when it's time to retire, when you stop believing in your dreams - and could still clearly remember a time when you did? In regards to the second part of Pessoa's point, I think all of us are feeling more than a little violated at the moment. I'm definitely feeling it, which is why I'm actively turning away from the news and social media, and disappearing into books and also this blog. Maybe being considered a madman (or being considered a madman by more people) would actually bring some peace.
If I carefully consider the life men lead, I find nothing to distinguish it from the life of animals. Both man and animal are hurled unconsciously through things and the world; both have their leisure moments; both complete the same organic cycle day after day; both think nothing beyond what they think, nor live beyond what they live. A cat wallow in the sun and goes to sleep. Man wallows in life, with all of its complexities, and goes to sleep. Neither one escapes the fatal law of being what he is. Neither one tries to shake off the weight of being.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 166
I'm going to disagree with Pessoa on one key point here: animals would never vote for Trump, because they would never vote against their own self-interest, which tens of millions of Americans have done, some of them three times, and they would happily do so again (and I'm sure the GOP sycophants in Congress will love to give them a chance for a fourth vote). As I've proposed previously, we are witnessing the grandest cognitive dissonance experiment in history. Millions upon millions voted for an undelivered tax break (unless you're rich) or cheaper groceries (which are going to up in price), but cannot admit that they made a dreadful mistake. Instead, they are changing their words and deeds, and becoming more cruel and fanatical, to alleviate, unconsciously, the psychic dissonance they are feeling. Once again, as we've always known, animals are simply better than we are.
I envy - but I'm not sure that I envy - those for whom a biography could be written, or who could write their own. In these ransom impressions, and with no desire to e other than random, I indifferently narrate my factless autobiography, my lifeless history. These are my Confessions, and if in them I saw nothing, it's because I have nothing to say.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 12
Since I referenced Pessoa's notion of a "factless autobiography" in the previous post I figured I go ahead and include the original passage. I don't read many biographies or autobiographies, but one of the reasons why I think they sometimes fail is that they include way too much information. Recently I read three massive biographies of Marcus Aurelius, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa. I was not not sold on the first two, whereas I thought the Pessoa one (Richard Zenith's) was extraordinary. One of the reasons why Zenith's was so good was that I think it, while providing outside events and movements as context, it didn't get lost in them, which allowed the reader to truly immerse themselves into Pessoa as a writer and thinker. The others were almost too crowded with events, whereas Pessoa's, partially because while he led a busy life he didn't go far beyond the outskirts of Lisbon itself, we could get more into his inner life. In the same way, one of the reasons why The Book of Disquiet works as an autobiography of a sorts for Pessoa is that it is told through the heteronym (of in the case of Soares a partial heteronym) so the facts, like trees, don't block out the sun.
I'm in the process of making plans to head back to Portugal for a quick visit in June. I found a conference in Lisbon and I'm in the process of putting together a paper. There is an inherent danger on presenting on Fernando Pessoa in Portugal, clearly, but I obviously don't have the sense that God gave a goose (as we'd say in Indiana). The last heteronym that Pessoa created was Maria Jose, a nineteen year old hunchbacked girl who was dying of tuberculosis. All she produced was a love letter that was never sent, telling of her love for a strong worker who routinely passed beneath her window. It is devastating in its sadness, but it's also very beautiful; my students read it on the first night of class this semester and they really liked it. I want to view the letter in relation to Pessoa's concept of a "factless autobiography," which he tells through the lens of Bernardo Soares in The Book of Disquiet. Doubtless, I'm in over my head, but I love to give myself new challenges.
To submit to nothing, whether to a man or a love or an idea, and to have the aloof independence of not believing in the truth or even (if it existed) in the usefulness of knowing it - this seems to me the right attitude for the intellectual inner life of those who can't live without thinking. To belong is synonymous with banality. Creeds, ideals, a woman, a profession - all are prisons and shackles. To be is to be free. Even ambition, if we take pride in it, is a hindrance; we wouldn't be proud of it if we realized it's a string by which we're pulled. No: no ties even to ourselves! Free from ourselves as well as from others, contemplatives with ecstasy, thinkers without conclusions, and liberated from God, we will live the few moments of bliss allowed us in the prison yard by the distraction of our executioners.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 336
"To belong is synonymous with banality." I've talked about how when I first picked up The Book of Disquiet I simply didn't understand it, and I needed a little context to gain a foothold - and then I fell in love with it. What I began to realize about Pessoa is that it's not simply that he was a contrarian or a Goth before they had been recreated as an American cultural niche or just a very conscious weirdo, but rather that he was a person with a very tender soul, who was hoping to live a life that didn't cause pain; it was, I would argue, less about accomplishing something, but rather trying to limit emotional bruising. It's the literary equivalent of Neil Young's A Man Needs a Maid, a song that I think is also equally misunderstood.
I tremble when someone speaks well. Certain pages from Fialho and from Chateaubriand make my whole being tingle in all of its pores, makes me rave in a still shiver with impossible pleasure.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 259
The world is a prison. A Chateaubriand dreams the impossible? Human life is tedious.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 278
We apply the name 'Romantics' both to the great men who failed and to the little men who showed themselves for what they were. But the only similarity between the two is in their overt sentimentality, which in the former denotes an inability to make active use of intelligence, while in the latter it denotes that lack of intelligence itself. A Chateaubriand and a Hugo, a Vigny and a Michelet, are products of the same age. but Chateaubriand is a great soul that was diminished, Hugo a little soul that was inflated by the winds of the day. Virny is a genius that had to flee, Michelet a woman that was forced to be a man of genius. In the father of them all, Jean Jacques Rousseau, the two tendencies coincide. He possessed, in equal measure, the intelligence of a creator and the sensibility of a slave.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 249
It's curious that what little capacity I have for enthusiasm is aroused by hose most unlike me in temperament. I admire no one in literature more than the classical writers, who are the ones I least resembled. Forced to choose between reading only Chateaubriand or Vieira, I would choose Vieira without a moment's hesitation.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 71
By comments on the previous post on Chateaubriand made me think about his relationship to Pessoa, or maybe it would be better to think about Pessoa's relationship to Chateaubriand. So, I made a quick run through The Book of Disquiet and culled out all the references to Chateaubriand (I may have missed a couple, so I'll take another look later). It might make an interesting paper at a smaller, quieter conference, to discuss what it is about Chateaubriand's writing that so appealed to both Pessoa and Proust. So, this is the first step, or maybe it's not.
I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it - without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgements based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to , seeing not only the multitude he's a part of but also the wide-open space around it. That's why I didn't give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped, whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its cries of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 1
And so, The Book of Disquiet begins. A couple of days ago, on Monday, I introduced my reworked COR 204 students to Fernando Pessoa. It's early days yet, but the response was what I expected, a pretty dramatic split. One of the students got up early and walked out, I assumed for a bathroom break but he never returned. On the other hand, a few of the brighter kids were clearly blown away. One of the students, clearly one of the brighter more perceptive ones, was amazed that he had never heard of Fernando Pessoa before. I told him not to fret about it since I had never read any Pessoa until I was in my 60s. I told them that there was often a work that dominated my intellectual life by decade: discovering Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio when I was fourteen or making my way through Proust's Remembrance of Things Past in my fifties, and that Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet was the literary work of my sixties (which is, alarmingly, a decade half over already). As I've gotten older I've come to believe that my job is mainly to make my students think, and that I often need to shock their sensibilities to make that happen. As Pessoa, opening this work, proposes, "I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in Gd, for the same reason their elders had had it - without knowing why."
