The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Read Online Free PDF Page A

roof with her (along with two great-aunts) and reading, during the same period, Max Nordau’s
Degeneration (1892)
set him to thinking and writing almost obsessively about the relationship between genius and madness (his archives contain over a hundred texts on the topic, nearly all of them unpublished). Perhaps his main problem was that very obsessiveness. At the end of the above-mentioned passage signed by
Alexander Search in
1908,
we read: “One of my mental complications—horrible beyond words—is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity
.”
    Pessoa remarked, in
The Book of Disquiet
and elsewhere, that a madman is not liable to see the madness of his own ideas, which may explain his keen interest in learning how other people saw him. Knowing that he would probably never return to South Africa, he decided to go for broke, writing several of his former teachers under a false name, as a psychiatrist requesting information about his mentally deranged patient, namely Pessoa. In a letter of inquiry to Clifford Geerdts, a former classmate, the phony shrink was to announce that Pessoa had, apparently, committed suicide. Pessoa did not strictly follow his plan, but we know that in
1907
Mr. Belcher, who was Pessoa’s English teacher in Durban, did receive a letter from a “Dr. Faustino Antunes” asking for information about his former student, and Geerdts was also sent a letter—not the rough draft published on pp. 12–13, but a letter like the one to Belcher, stating that Pessoa was suffering from a mental disorder. Both men duly replied, and Geerdts’s letter—which was the more forthcoming—included the following observations about Pessoa:
     
•
“He was pale and thin and appeared physically to be very imperfectly developed. He had a narrow and contracted chest and was inclined to stoop.”
• “...
he was inclined to be morbid.”
•
“[He was] regarded as a brilliantly clever boy.”
•
“... he had learned [English] so rapidly and so well that he had a splendid style in that language.”
•
“[He was] meek and inoffensive and inclined to avoid association with his schoolfellows.”
•
“He took no part in athletic sports of any kind and I think his spare time was spent in reading. We generally considered that he worked far too much and that he would ruin his health by so doing.”
    In fact Pessoa, with incredible sangfroid, first wrote to Mr. Belcher in South Africa, waited for his reply, then wrote Geerdts at Oxford (where he had gone to study), relaying some of Belcher’s comments and asking if Geerdts
agreed. All of this in the name of Dr. Faustino Antunes, who turns out to be more than just a clinical psychiatrist, for he was also the signing author of an “Essay on Intuition.”
    From the schoolboy script in which it was written, we know that the opening passage in this section probably dates from when Pessoa was still in his teens, but he posed as an old man looking back: “I was a poet animated by philosophy,” and, in the penultimate paragraph, “There is for me—there
was—
a wealth of meaning
(...)”.
Whether writing under his own or an invented name, Pessoa already revealed what he called—in a passage signed by Alexander Search—“an inborn tendency to mystification, to artistic lying.”

“I was a poet animated by philosophy”
     
    I was a poet animated by philosophy, not a philosopher with poetic faculties. I loved to admire the beauty of things, to trace in the imperceptible and through the minute the poetic soul of the universe.
    ...
    Poetry is in everything—in land and in sea, in lake and in riverside. It is in the city too—deny it not—it is evident to me here as I sit: there is poetry in this table, in this paper, in this inkstand; there is poetry in the rattling of the cars on the streets, in each minute, common, ridiculous motion of a workman who [on] the other side of the street is painting the signboard of a butcher’s shop.
    Mine inner sense predominates