August 3, 2020

"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because..."

"... they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."

Wrote Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet.

Here's a statue of him at a café in Lisbon — seated, with his own table, like another customer.


cc — Nol Aders

A fascinating character!
Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views....

After his return to Portugal, when he was seventeen, Pessoa barely left his beloved city of Lisbon.... Pessoa adopted the detached perspective of the flâneur Bernardo Soares, another of his heteronyms. This character was supposedly an accountant, working for Vasques, the boss of an office located in Douradores Street. Soares also supposedly lived in the same downtown street, a world that Pessoa knew quite well due to his long career as freelance correspondence translator. Indeed, from 1907 until his death in 1935, Pessoa worked in twenty-one firms located in Lisbon's downtown, sometimes in two or three of them simultaneously. In The Book of Disquiet, Bernardo Soares describes... crowds in the streets, buildings, shops, traffic, river Tagus, the weather, and even its author, Fernando Pessoa:
Fairly tall and thin, he must have been about thirty years old. He hunched over terribly when sitting down but less so standing up, and he dressed with a carelessness that wasn’t entirely careless. In his pale, uninteresting face there was a look of suffering that didn’t add any interest, and it was difficult to say just what kind of suffering this look suggested. It seemed to suggest various kinds: hardships, anxieties, and the suffering born of the indifference that comes from having already suffered a lot. 

17 comments:

The Crack Emcee said...

Conservatives LOVE saying "family" is the foundation for success - without acknowledging their contribution to adding so much stress to black life that they - literally - made families impossible to maintain without psychiatrists.

Families are now "impossible things" thanks to them.

Temujin said...

Great post. It'll give me a new path of reading this fall.

Joe Smith said...

That first paragraph is spot-on in my experience...

He either liked to lead different lives for his own amusement or had Multiple Personality Disorder, believing himself to be who he wasn't.

I wonder if any of those 'people' were women? Probably not...he couldn't be THAT crazy...

Bilwick said...

"The longing for impossible things . . ." Like socialism producing a wealthy and free society, and suspension of the laws of economics.

Big Mike said...

His pants have an even better crease than Obama’s.

iowan2 said...

Crack, right, 100 years ago is exactly like today. At least the body count is about the same. Do you think posting this is going to sway a single person reading this? Not a single reader, being alive in 1919? How many 100's of thousand white men paid with their life for the advancement of society and the betterment of Blacks?

What percent of Black babies were born into single mother households in 1919?
Unsure how you got to this, from the post.

Kassaar said...

Pessoa was a deeply troubled man, but he didn’t lead many lives or suffer from MPD. His many heteronyms formed a well thought out literary construction.

mikee said...

"Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am."

Jmae Agee 1938 Knoxville: Summer of 1915

Family, a loving mystery.

mezzrow said...

You made me click, Crack. Tasty bait. Mmmmm...

Enjoyed the post.

Rob said...

He looks like the funeral director at the beginning of “The Godfather.”

Ann Althouse said...

When I saw the photograph, I saw "He looks like there was another Marx brother who was terribly depressed."

The Crack Emcee said...

iowan2 said...

"Crack, right, 100 years ago is exactly like today."

The pain and anxiety of having your entire family, community, etc. destroyed goes away, for everyone involved, as soon as it's over - POOF! - because of all the community support America's provided. There's no consequences, nobody deciding law - right and wrong - doesn't matter, nobody deciding whites are the Devil, nothing.

Everybody just goes on like "normal".

Gotcha.

You people are INSANE.

RigelDog said...

It's not proof of God--there is no water-tight proof--but I have had these kinds of longings, and also pangs of Joy--since I was a child, and I consider them as evidence that we are sensing something beyond this material world. Something we were made for and we will never attain while on this side of the divide.

Banjo said...

When I was a kid seven or eight I was convinced on the garage roof to walk out on a plank anchored on the other side by a heavier kid. I think we were playing pirates or something. When I reached the end, he stepped off. Down I went, landing on soft ground. I lay there for an instant and a man's voice to the left of me, kind but urgent, said, "Jerry, roll over." I did and the plank landed where I had been. Turn it over somebody on the roof called. A spike that would have impaled me was on the other side. I said thanks for the warning, but the guys on the roof said no one had spoken.

Kai Akker said...

The things that are impossible hurt the worst.

GIGO. Tell that to gold star parents, divorced couples, bereaved widows and widowers. Just to start.

Surrealists and other self-indulgent types like this creator of 70 or 80 or more personae don't bother with the basics. They are into their flights of fancy and seek a tone, a style... Logical fallacy is OK with them as long as it sounds good.

So Pessoa in his solipsism equates "nostalgia for what never was" with "desire for what could have been."

Do I have to be the heavy on this? Obviously "what could have been" could have been. That is not equal to nostalgia for what never was, which is obviously the daydreams of someone with too much leisure time on his hands.

GIGO.

Mike said...

Thanks for this post. Really, this is the best sort of blogging. New stuff, fascinating things to contemplate, whether old or new.

Earnest Prole said...

Saudade is a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound melancholic longing for an absent something or someone that one cares for and/or loves. Moreover, it often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might never be had again. It is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, and well-being, which now trigger the senses and make one experience the pain of separation from those joyous sensations. However it acknowledges that to long for the past would detract from the excitement you feel towards the future. Saudade describes both happy and sad at the same time, which is most closely translated to the English saying ‘bittersweet.'