/lit/ - Literature

>>15690974
this

>"Pessoa held a lifelong job as bookkeeper and translator of foreign correspondence in Lisbon, a city he rarely left, and lived an extremely solitary life, never marrying. Josipovici describes him as a man who dressed "with the utmost correctness; a man of few gestures in a peninsula of gesticulators; smoking up to eighty cigarettes a day"

>"Despite his apparently ascetic and asexual nature, Pessoa was recalled by friends and neighbours as a deeply lonely man, his outlook on intimacy oscillating wildly between complete rejection of love in favour of intellectual pursuits, to obsessive - and rather worrying - devotion to women who are unlikely to have been aware of his feelings towards them. One theory claims that some of Pessoa's earliest heteronyms were invented to allow him to write lengthy erotic letters - discovered several decades after his death - to various young women living in Lisbon, without the risk of these letters being associated with him."

>"As far as is known, he died a virgin; he did take up with one Ophelia Queiroz when he was 31 and she 19 — she also wrote to some of the heteronyms. After six months Pessoa broke it off, saying that he was not like other humans, followed a different Law."

>"During 1914, while living with his Aunt Anica on Lisbon's Rua Pascoal de Melo, the twenty-six-year old Pessoa revealed in a diary entry how loneliness and a lack of either material or artistic success had burdened him with immense feelings of failure and despondency. Treating his diary as a kind of maternal figure, Pessoa demands to know why he has so far failed to establish any kind of name for himself in Lisbon or formed any lasting bonds with its inhabitants. "Why do I only condone a ghost-like existence for myself. Wherever I go, I haunt. I sense the deep unease which people feel in my company - even my employer treats me with a kind of pity which is unbecoming of a man so assertive and so otherwise willing to lend no sympathetic attention to his business. Must I always perceive life as though through a glass window, fearing always that it will become obscured by the heat and revelry aside and leave me entirely alone outside on the abandoned street? Why, dear diary, do I fail to penetrate life like other writers and philosophers do with some competence? Tonight I feel abandoned once again. My spirit aches. The world outside proceeds while I yearn like a chained dog to be allowed to travel with it. Worse still is that there is no chain preventing me from living the life of a human being.""

Who is the best female philosopher?