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

humor, citizen of the world, idealistic philosopher, etc. etc. (to spare the reader further pains)—
    in the name of TRUTH, SCIENCE, and PHILOSOPHIA, not with bell, book, and candle but with pen, ink, and paper—
    pass sentence of excommunication on all priests and all sectarians of all religions in the world.
Excommunicabo vos.
Be damned to you all.
Ainsi-soit-il.
    Reason, Truth, Virtue per C. R. A.
     

“I am tired of confiding in myself
     
    July 25, 1907
    I am tired of confiding in myself, of lamenting over myself, of pitying mine own self with tears. I have just had a kind of scene with Aunt Rita* over F. Coelho.* At the end of it I felt again one of those symptoms which grow clearer and ever more horrible in me: a moral vertigo. In physical vertigo there is a whirling of the external world about us; in moral vertigo, of the interior world. I seemed for a moment to lose the sense of the true relations of things, to lose comprehension, to fall into an abyss of mental abeyance. It is a horrible sensation, one that prompts* inordinate fear. These feelings are becoming common, they seem to pave my way to a new mental life, which shall of course be madness.
    In my family there is no comprehension of my mental state—no, none. They laugh at me, sneer at me, disbelieve me; they say I wish to be extraordinary. They neglect to analyze the
wish to be
extraordinary. They cannot comprehend that between being and wishing to be extraordinary there is but the difference of consciousness being added to thesecond. It is the same case as that of myself playing with tin soldiers at seven and at fourteen years; in one [moment] they were things, in the other things and playthings at the same time; yet the impulse to play with them remained, and that was the real, fundamental psychical state.
    I have no one in whom to confide. My family understands nothing. My friends I cannot trouble with these things; I have no really intimate friends, and even were there one intimate, in world’s ways, yet he were not intimate in the way I understand intimacy. I am shy and unwilling to make known my woes. An intimate friend is one of my ideal things, one of my daydreams, yet an intimate friend is a thing I never shall have. No temperament fits me; there is no character in this world which shows a chance of approaching what I dream of* in an intimate friend. No more of this.
    Mistress or sweetheart I have none; it is another of my ideals and one fraught, unto the soul of it, with a real nothingness. It cannot be as I dream. Alas! poor Alastor! Shelley, how I understand thee! Can I confide in Mother? Would that I had her here. I cannot confide in her either,* but her presence would abate much of my pain. I feel as lonely as a wreck at sea. And I am a wreck indeed. So I confide in myself. In myself? What confidence is there in these lines? There is none. As I read them over I ache in mind to perceive how pretentious, how literary-diary-like they are! In some I have even made style. Yet I suffer nonetheless. A man may suffer as much in a suit of silks as in a sack or in a torn blanket.
    No more.

[An Unsent Letter to Clifford Geerdts]
Faustino Antunes
     
    [I am writing you about the] late Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, who is thought to have committed suicide; at least he blew up a country house in which he was, dying he and several other people—a crime (?) which caused [a] great sensation in Portugal at the time (several months ago). I have been requested to inquire, as far as is now possible, into his mental condition and, having heard that the deceased was with you in the Durban High School, must beg you to write me stating frankly how he was considered among the boys at the said institution. Write me as detailed an account as possible on this. What opinion was held of him? Intellectually? Socially? etc. Did he seem or did he not seem capable of such an act as I have described?
    I must ask you to keep, as far as possible, silence in this matter;