/lit/ - Literature

«Hello, keeper of sheep,
There at the side of the road,
What does the passing wind say to you? »

«That it is wind, and that it passes,
And that it has already passed before
And that it will pass after.
And to you what does it say? »

«Much more than that.
It tells me of many other things.
Of memories and being homesick
And of things that never were.»

«You never heard the wind pass by. The wind only talks about wind. What you heard from him was a lie, And the lie is within you. »

>>15251737
Next comes the black procession to the vault or grave,
And finally the beginning of the death of your memory.
At first everyone feels relieved
That the slightly irksome tragedy of your death is over…
Then, with each passing day, the conversation lightens up
And life falls back into its old routine…

Then you are slowly forgotten.
You’re remembered only twice a year:
On you birthday and your death day.
That’s it.
That’s all.
That’s absolutely all.
Two times a year they think about you.
Two times a year those who loved you heave a sigh,
And they may sigh on the rare occasions someone mentions your name.

Look at yourself in the face and honestly face what we are…
If you want to kill yourself, then kill yourself…
Forget your moral scruples or intellectual fears!
What scruples or fears influence the workings of life?
What chemical scruples rule the driving impulse
Of sap, the blood’s circulation, and love?
What memory of others exists in the joyous rhythm of life?

Ah, vanity of flesh and blood called man,
Can’t you see that you’re utterly unimportant?

You’re important to yourself,
because you’re what you feel.
You’re everything to yourself,
because for you you’re the universe,
The real universe and other people
Being mere satellites of your objective subjectivity.
You matter to yourself,
because you’re all that matters to you.
And if this is true for you, O myth, then won’t it be true for others?

Do you, like Hamlet, dread the unknown?
But what is known?
What do you really know
Such that you can call anything “unknown”?

Do you, like Falstaff, love life with all its fat?
If you love it so materially, then love it even more materially
By becoming a bodily part of the earth and of things!
Scatter yourself, O physicochemical system
Of nocturnally conscious cells,
Over the nocturnal consciousness of the unconsciousness of bodies,
Over the huge blanket of appearances that blankets nothing,
Over the grass and weeds of proliferating beings,
Over the atomic fog of things,
Over the whirling walls Of the dynamic void that’s the world…

> “I don’t complain about the world. I don’t protest in the name of the universe. I’m not a pessimist. I suffer and complain, but I don’t know if suffering is the norm, nor do I know if it’s human to suffer. (…) I’m not a pessimist. I’m sad.”

>>14612024
You really should only read it when you're already feeling melancholy, tired or lonesome.

>Life is what you make of it.
It's the last line, I think, of a fragment of Book of Disquiet

The superior man differs from the inferior man and his animal brothers by the simple trait of irony. Irony is the first sign that our consciousness has become conscious, and it passes through two stages: the one represented by Socrates, when he says, ‘All I know is that I know nothing,’ and the other represented by Sanches,* when he says, ‘I don’t even know if I know nothing.’ In the first stage we dogmatically doubt ourselves, and every superior man arrives there. In the second stage we come to doubt not only ourselves but also our own doubt, and few men have reached that point in the already so long yet short span of time that the human race has beheld the sun and night over the earth’s variegated surface. To know oneself is to err, and the oracle that said ‘Know thyself’ proposed a task more difficult than the labours of Hercules and a riddle murkier than the Sphinx’s. To consciously not know ourselves – that’s the way! And to conscientiously not know ourselves is the active task of irony. I know nothing greater, nor more worthy of the truly great man, than the patient and expressive analysis of the ways in which we don’t know ourselves, the conscious recording of the unconsciousness of our conscious states, the metaphysics of autonomous shadows, the poetry of the twilight of disillusion. But something always eludes us, some analysis or other always gets muddled, and the truth – even if false – is always beyond the next corner. And this is what tires us even more than life (when life tires us) and more than the knowledge and contemplation of life (which always tire us). I stand up from the chair where, propped distractedly against the table, I’ve entertained myself with the narration of these strange impressions. I stand up, propping my body on itself, and walk to the window, higher than the surrounding rooftops, and I watch the city going to sleep in a slow beginning of silence. The large and whitely white moon sadly clarifies the terraced differences in the buildings opposite. The moonlight seems to illuminate icily all the world’s mystery. It seems to reveal everything, and everything is shadows with admixtures of faint light, false and unevenly absurd gaps, inconsistencies of the visible. There’s no breeze, and the mystery seems to loom larger. I feel queasy in my abstract thought. I’ll never write a page that sheds light on me or that sheds light on anything. A wispy cloud hovers hazily over the moon, like a coverture. I’m ignorant, like these rooftops. I’ve failed, like all of nature.

Pessoa is the universe
We are all heteronyms of Pessoa