The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Read Online Free PDF

in such a way over my five senses that I see things in this life—I do believe it—in a way different from other men. There is for me—there was—a wealth of meaning in a thing so ridiculous as a door key, a nail on a wall, a cat’s whiskers. There is to me a fullness of spiritual suggestion in a fowl with its chickens strutting across the road. There is to me a meaning deeper than human fears in the smell of sandalwood, in the old tins on a dirt heap, in a matchbox lying in the gutter, in two dirty papers which, on a windy day, will roll and chase each other down the street.
    For poetry is astonishment, admiration, as of a being fallen from the skies taking full consciousness of his fall, astonished at things. As of one who knew things in their soul, striving to remember this knowledge,remembering that it was not thus he knew them, not under these forms and these conditions, but remembering nothing more.

“The artist must be born beautiful”
     
    The artist must be born beautiful and elegant; for he that worships beauty must not himself be unfair. And it is assuredly a terrible pain for an artist to find not at all in himself that which he strives for. Who, looking at the portraits of Shelley, of Keats, of Byron, of Milton, and of Poe, can wonder that these were poets? All were beautiful, all were beloved and admired, all had in love warmth of life and heavenly joy, as far as any poet, or indeed any man, can have.

“I have always had in consideration”
     
    I have always had in consideration a case which is extremely interesting and which brings up* a problem not the less interesting. I considered the case of a man becoming immortal under a pseudonym, his real name hidden and unknown. Such a man would, thinking upon it, not consider himself really immortal but an unknown, [destined] to be immortal in deed. “And yet what is the name?” he would consider. Nothing at all. “What then,” I said to myself, “is immortality in art, in poesy, in anything whatsoever?”

Three Prose Fragments
Charles Robert Anon
     

1.
     
    Ten thousand times my heart broke within me. I cannot count the sobs that shook me, the pains that ate into my heart.
    Yet I have seen other things also which have brought tears into mine eyes and have shaken me like a stirred leaf. I have seen men and women giving life, hopes, all for others. I have seen such acts of high devotedness that I have wept tears of gladness. These things, I have thought, are beautiful, although they are powerless to redeem. They are the pure rays of the sun on the vast dung-heap of the world.
    * * *
     

2.
     
    I saw the little children ...
    A hatred of institutions, of conventions, kindled my soul with its fire. A hatred of priests and kings rose in me like a flooded stream. I had been a Christian, warm, fervent, sincere; my emotional, sensitive nature demanded food for its hunger, fuel for its fire. But when I looked upon these men and women, suffering and wicked, I saw how little they deserved the curse of a further hell. What greater hell than this life? What greater curse than living? “This free will,” I cried to myself, “this also is a convention and a falsehood invented by men that they might punish and slay and torture with the word ‘justice,’ which is a nickname of crime. ‘Judge not,’ the Bible has it—the Bible; ‘judge not, that ye may not be judged!’”
    When I had been a Christian I had thought men responsible for the ill they did—I hated tyrants, I cursed kings and priests. When I had shaken off the immoral, the false influence of the philosophy of Christ, I hated tyranny, kinghood, priestdom—evil in itself. Kings and priests I pitied because they were men.

3.
     
    I, Charles Robert Anon,
being
, animal, mammal, tetrapod, primate, placental, ape, catarrhina, … man; eighteen years of age, not married (except at odd moments), megalomaniac, with touches of dipsomania,
dégénéré supérieur
, poet, with pretensions to written