/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.13892112]

"Nothing irks me more than the vocabulary of social responsibility. The
very word ‘duty’ is unpleasant to me, like an unwanted guest. But the
terms ‘civic duty’, ‘solidarity’, ‘humanitarianism’ and others of the same
ilk disgust me like rubbish dumped out of a window right on top of me.
I’m offended by the implicit assumption that these expressions pertain to
me, that I should find them worthwhile and even meaningful.
I recently saw in a toy-shop window some objects that reminded me
exactly of what these expressions are: make-believe dishes filled with
make-believe tidbits for the miniature table of a doll. For the real,
sensual, vain and selfish man, the friend of others because he has the gift
of speech and the enemy of others because he has the gift of life, what is
there to gain from playing with the dolls of hollow and meaningless
words?"

- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892118]

>>13892112
Based and Fucknormiespilled

[Anonymous No.13892123]

>>13892118
I can't get enough of this book.

"see humanity as merely one of Nature’s latest schools of decorative
painting. I don’t distinguish in any fundamental way between a man and
a tree, and I naturally prefer whichever is more decorative, whichever
interests my thinking eyes."

[Anonymous No.13892136]

"Men of action are the involuntary slaves of the men of reason. The
worth of things depends on their interpretation. Certain men make
things which other men invest with meaning, bringing them to life. To
narrate is to create, while to live is merely to be lived."

- Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892148]

>>13892112
That's all well and good and I can empathize certainly with the upshot of what Pessoa is declaiming here, but some statesmen have writ some wonderful works of art, both lasting and profound.

[Anonymous No.13892157]

"Whether I like it or not, everything that isn’t my soul is no more for me
than scenery and decoration. Through rational thought I can recognize
that a man is a living being just like me, but for my true, involuntary self
he has always had less importance than a tree, if the tree is more
beautiful. That’s why I’ve always seen human events – the great
collective tragedies of history or of what we make of history – as
colourful friezes, with no soul in the figures that appear there. I’ve never
thought twice about anything tragic that has happened in China. It’s just
scenery in the distance, even if painted with blood and disease."

- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892170]

"With ironic sadness I remember a workers’ demonstration, carried out
with I don’t know how much sincerity (for I find it hard to admit
sincerity in collective endeavours, given that the individual, all by
himself, is the only entity capable of feeling). It was a teeming and
rowdy group of animated idiots, who passed by my outsider’s
indifference shouting various things. I instantly felt disgusted. They
weren’t even sufficiently dirty. Those who truly suffer don’t form a
group or go around as a mob. Those who suffer, suffer alone.
What a pathetic group! What a lack of humanity and true pain! They
were real and therefore unbelievable. No one could ever use them for
the scene of a novel or a descriptive backdrop. They went by like
rubbish in a river, in the river of life, and to see them go by made me
sick to my stomach and profoundly sleepy."

- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892180]

"Dogs and men, cats and heroes, fleas and geniuses – we all play
at existing without thinking about it (the most advanced of us thinking
only about thinking) under the vast stillness of the stars. The others – the
mystics of pain and sacrifice – at least feel, in their body and their daily
lives, the magic presence of mystery. They have escaped, for they reject
the visible sun; they know plenitude, for they’ve emptied themselves of
the world’s nothingness.
Speaking about them, I almost feel like a mystic myself, though I know
I could never be more than these words written whenever the whim hits
me. I will always belong to the Rua dos Douradores, like all of humanity.
I will always be, in verse or prose, an office employee. I will always be,
with or without mysticism, local and submissive, a servant of my
feelings and of the moments when they occur. I will always be, under
the large blue canopy of the silent sky, a pageboy in an unintelligible
rite, dressed in life for the occasion, executing steps, gestures, stances
and expressions without knowing why, until the feast – or my role in it –
ends and I can treat myself to tidbits in the large tents I’ve been told are
down below, at the back of the garden."

- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892188]

>>13892112
>WAAAAAH I DON'T WANNAAAAA PAY MY DEBT TO SOCIETY WAAAAAAAAAAAH
So many words for something so banal.

[Anonymous No.13892191]

>>13892188
Society is a spook.

[Anonymous No.13892199]

>>13892188
>t. brainlet who got brainwashed into making someone else more money

[Anonymous No.13892216]

>>13892188
Cringe and lowIQpill.
>>13892191
>>13892199
Based and highIQpiill.

[Anonymous No.13892220]

>>13892188
How does anyone have a debt to society? How is this debt imputed to them?

[Anonymous No.13892228]

>>13892191
Belief in spooks is a spook.

[Anonymous No.13892234]

>>13892220
Well first you are brought up to think and act a certain way and then you thank the arbiters of your soul through taxes and voting. Fairly logical.

[Anonymous No.13892240]

>>13892112
JBP BTFO

[Anonymous No.13892263]

>>13892220
If I was born in a different society, my life would've been worse, unless I was born in Norway or Sweden. I was happy to serve as a conscript because this society has given me so much and it's worth defending for others.

[Anonymous No.13892268]

>>13892234
How does society bringing me up create a debt? How does that obligate me to do anything? And what if I simply say no and don't do what they think I'm obligated to do?
>>13892263
That's nice but it doesn't tell me how society can create a debt within your person.

[Anonymous No.13892282]

"Each face, even if seen just yesterday, is
different today, because today isn’t yesterday. Each day is the day it is,
and there was never another one like it in the world. Only our soul
makes the identification – a genuinely felt but erroneous identification –
by which everything becomes similar and simplified. The world is a set
of distinct things with varied edges, but if we’re near-sighted, it’s a
continual and indecipherable fog."
- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892286]

"I feel like fleeing. Like fleeing from what I know, fleeing from what’s
mine, fleeing from what I love. I want to depart, not for impossible
Indias or for the great islands south of everything, but for any place at
all – village or wilderness – that isn’t this place. I want to stop seeing
these unchanging faces, this routine, these days. I want to rest, far
removed, from my inveterate feigning. I want to feel sleep come to me as
life, not as rest. A cabin on the seashore or even a cave in a rocky
mountainside could give me this, but my will, unfortunately, cannot."
- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892298]

"Everything that surrounds us becomes part of us, infiltrating our
physical sensations and our feeling of life, and like spittle of the great
Spider it subtly binds us to whatever is close, tucking us into a soft bed
of slow death which is rocked by the wind. Everything is us, and we are
everything, but what good is this, if everything is nothing? A ray of
sunlight, a cloud whose shadow tells us it is passing, a breeze that rises,
the silence that follows when it ceases, one or another face, a few voices,
the incidental laughter of the girls who are talking, and then night with
the meaningless, fractured hieroglyphs of the stars."

- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892302]

"And I, who timidly hate life, fear death with fascination.* I fear this
nothingness that could be something else, and I fear it as nothing and as
something else simultaneously, as if gross horror and nonexistence could
coincide there, as if my coffin could entrap the eternal breathing of a
bodily soul, as if immortality could be tormented by confinement. The
idea of hell, which only a satanic soul could have invented, seems to me
to have derived from this sort of confusion – a mixture of two different
fears that contradict and contaminate each other."
- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892311]

"Page by page I slowly and lucidly reread everything I’ve written, and I
find that it’s all worthless and should have been left unwritten. The
things we achieve, whether empires or sentences, have (because they’ve
been achieved) the worst aspect of real things: the fact they’re
perishable. But that’s not what worries or grieves me about these pages
as I reread them now, in these idle moments. What grieves me is that it
wasn’t worth my trouble to write them, and the time I spent doing it
earned me nothing but the illusion, now shattered, that it was worth
doing."
- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892318]

"What grieves me is that my best is no good, and that another whom I
dream of, if he existed, would have done it better. Everything we do, in
art or in life, is the imperfect copy of what we thought of doing. It belies
the notion of inner as well as of outer perfection; it falls short not only of
the standard it should meet but also of the standard we thought it could
meet. We’re hollow on the inside as well as on the outside, pariahs in
our expectations and in our realizations."
- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892331]

"Only one thing astonishes me more than the stupidity with which most
people live their lives, and that’s the intelligence of this stupidity."
- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892346]

>>13892188
>this comment brought to you by Charles Koch, who wants to remind you to always vote libertarian, because people don’t matter, just Koch money!

[Anonymous No.13892352]

"On the face of it, the monotony of ordinary lives is horrifying. In this
simple restaurant where I’m eating lunch, I look at the figure of the cook
behind the counter and at the old waiter, near my table, who serves me
and who I believe has been a waiter here for thirty years. What kind of
lives do these men lead? For forty years that figure of a man has spent
most of every day in a kitchen; he doesn’t get much time off; he sleeps
relatively little; he occasionally goes to his home town, returning
without hesitation or regret; he slowly saves his slowly earned money,
which he has no plans to spend; he would get ill if he had to retire for
good from his kitchen to the piece of land he bought in Galicia; he has
been in Lisbon for forty years and has never yet gone to the Rotunda* or
to a theatre, and just once to the circus at the Coliseum, whose clowns
still inhabit his life’s inner vestiges. He married – I don’t know how or
why – and has four sons and a daughter, and his smile, as he leans over
the counter in my direction, expresses a tremendous, solemn, satisfied
happiness. And he’s not pretending, nor would he have reason to
pretend. If he feels happy, it’s because he really is."
- Fernando Pessoa
- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13892360]

>>13892286
>notes from my soul

[Anonymous No.13892377]

The World as Will and Representation is children's book compared to The Book of Disquiet.

I'm honestly for being on 4chan sharing these quotes. Saying whatever comes to mind on boards such /r9k/. Being honest with myself and not having to wear a mask.

The illusion of love and art are the only things that makes me able to enjoy this theatrical thing called life.

I have no interest in video-games or anything else. Only love and death are important to me.

[Anonymous No.13892385]

>>13892377
>honestly glad

Fix'd.

[Anonymous No.13892423]

>>13892377
whoah...

[Anonymous No.13892654]

bump

[Anonymous No.13892843]

>>13892377
>I have no interest in video-games or anything else. Only love and death are important to me.

bretty based anon, you've taken the final pill

[Anonymous No.13892853]

>>13892123
OG edgelord

[Anonymous No.13892962]

>>13892188
I refuse to pay societal debts. I am a bankruptcy advocate and help people file for and qualify it.

[Anonymous No.13892981]

wtf I want to read this guy now

[Anonymous No.13893851]

>>13892981
>>13892981
Do it.

[Anonymous No.13893883]

>>13892220
You are a member of the society you live in. It doesn't matter if you like it or not. I don't know what you do in life, but chances are you would not be able to do it without a modern, complex society.
>>13892346
What I'm saying is the opposite of what those psychopaths believe. Libertarians worship the individual and the market to the detriment of any social obligation. They don't believe in politics or communal life. Just in transactional relationships. The Koch types only care about themselves and their vampire friends with their obscene wealth. I on the other hand remind you that you are not just a person in a vacuum. You are connected to the society (maybe more than one) that you were born into both on the level of thoughts and ideals, and on a material level. I think it's completely childish not to acknowledge that. I'm not saying you should just get a jerb like a dutiful drone. The bare minimum is just that recognition and taking a little interest in what is going on around you instead of spewing out shit like the OP about how you're such a beautiful, complex, real, sensual godlike man unlike all those gross normalfags.

[Anonymous No.13893886]

>>13892148
>some statesmen have writ some wonderful works of art, both lasting and profound.
name three

[Anonymous No.13893986]

>>13893886
Not your anon but I can think of two:
>John Milton
No introduction necessary I hope. He played a significant role in the English civil war and was a civil servant under Cromwell.
>Lord Byron
Fairly well known and influencial Romantic poet, and also a politician.

No one else comes to mind, but I'm sure that with some research a few others could be found. After all, there are many points in time where artists came from the aristocratic class. They could busy themselves with art and be quite good at it while also playing a significant role in politics.

[Anonymous No.13894049]

>Tfw you learn through social means to hate society so now you totally don't owe society anything despite it giving you nearly everything you have both mentally and materially

[Anonymous No.13894079]

>>13894049
He doesn't hate society, he finds it, like all things in life, an absurd. An absurd he can't escape from.

[Anonymous No.13894097]

>>13892112
>>13892123
>>13892136
>>13892157
this is all just a loser stuck in the aesthetic stage talking shit about people stuck in the ethics stage. there's nothing "based" about this.

[Anonymous No.13894098]

>>13894049

ABSOLUTELY Christological.

[Anonymous No.13894173]

>>13894097
>still in his stage stage

[Anonymous No.13894331]

>>13894097
You can clearly recognize a brainlet by his grammar. You're one of them.

[Anonymous No.13894747]

bumpsj

[Anonymous No.13895061]

>>13894331
Chances are that I have a firmer grasp of English grammar than you. Just because I'm not enough of a pedant to be exactly correct in my grammar when posting on an imageboard doesn't mean that you're more intelligent than me or that Pessoa wasn't a self-absorbed pissant.

[Anonymous No.13895894]

up

[Anonymous No.13896090]

>>13894097
>>13895061
go away and leap from a high cliff.

[Anonymous No.13896127]

>>13892112
>>13892123
>>13892136
tl:dr society is a spook
Well done, everyone already knows that.

[Anonymous No.13896234]

"Today the world belongs only to the stupid, the insensitive and the
agitated. Today the right to live and triumph is awarded on virtually the
same basis as admission into an insane asylum: an inability to think,
amorality, and nervous excitability."
- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13896278]

>>13893883
A tell tales sign of confirmation bias is noble vagaries. You have no idea of the trillion dollar infrastructure in place to turn you into a Koch broadcasting station who truly believes in their non-Koch ideological purity. You don’t think every heinous meme movement in history didn’t have have its purists? Look in the mirror pal, you’re a shill and you don’t even know it.

[Anonymous No.13896289]

"Everything in our activities that we hold to be superior participates in
death and is death. What are ideals but an admission that life is
worthless? What is art but the negation of life? A statue is a dead body,
chiselled to capture death in incorruptible matter. Pleasure itself, which
seems to be an immersion in life, is in fact an immersion in ourselves, a
destruction of the relations between us and life, an excited shadow of
death."
- Fernando Pessoa

[Anonymous No.13896314]

"Those o"f us who have risen highest merely have a deeper awareness of
how uncertain and empty everything is.
Perhaps we’re guided by an illusion; we’re surely not guided by
consciousness."
- Fernando Pessoa

Nietzsche BTFO

I even chuckled.

[Anonymous No.13896340]

"If one day I become financially secure, so that I can freely write and
publish, I know I’ll miss this precarious life in which I hardly write and
don’t publish at all. I’ll miss it not only because it will be a life, however
mediocre, that I’ll never have again, but also because every sort of life
has a special quality and particular pleasure, and when we take up
another life, even a better one, that particular pleasure isn’t as good, that
special quality is less special, until they fade away, and there’s
something missing."
-Fernando Pessoa

That's why I've never felt the need to leave my small town in the countryside.

[Anonymous No.13896498]

>>13896340
this is a real accurate quote.

[Anonymous No.13896556]

>>13896498
Anon, read his book. It's wonderful. Depressing but poetic and beautiful.

[Anonymous No.13897895]

>>13892112
TL;DR

[Anonymous No.13897939]

OMG WORDS!! <: D