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.
From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Richard Zenith)
Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.
Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet
The golden tint that still glows on waters abandoned by the setting sun is hovering on the surface of my weariness. I see myself as I see the lake I’ve imagined, and what I see in that lake is myself. I don’t know how to explain this image, or this symbol, or this that I envision. But I know I see, as if in reality I were seeing, a sun behind the hills that casts its doomed rays on to this lake that dark-goldenly simmers.
One of the perils of thinking is to see while thinking. Those who think with their reason are distracted. Those who think with their emotion are sleeping. Those who think with their desire are dead. I, however, think with my imagination, and all reason, sorrow and impulse in me are reduced to something remote and irrelevant, like this lifeless lake among rocks where the last light of the sun unlastingly hovers.
From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (translated by Richard Zenith)
Today my soul is sad unto my body. All of me hurts: memory, eyes and arms. It’s like a rheumatism in all that I am. My being isn’t touched by the day’s limpid brightness, by the sheer blue sky, by this unabating high tide of diffuse light. I’m not soothed by the soft cool breeze – autumnal but reminiscent of summer – which gives the air of personality. Nothing touches me. I’m sad, but not with a definite sadness, nor even with an indefinite sadness I’m sad down there, on the street littered with packing crates.
From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa (Translated by Richard Zenith)
We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.
Anais Nin
“Time! The past! Something – a voice, a song, a chance fragrance – lifts the curtain on my soul’s memories… That which I was and will never again be! That which I had and will never again have! The dead! The dead who loved me in my childhood. Whenever I remember them, my whole soul shivers and I feel exiled from all hearts, alone in the night of myself, weeping like a beggar before the closed silence of all doors.”
From The Book of Disquiet – Fernando Pessoa (translated by Richard Zenith)
Let everything happen to you,
beauty and terror,
just keep going,
no feeling is final.
Rainer Maria Rilke
You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.
Friedrich Nietzsche
‘When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.’
Albert Camus
“I’m almost convinced that I’m never awake. I’m not sure if I’m not in fact dreaming when I live, and living when I dream, or if dreaming and living are for me intersected, intermingled things that together form my conscious self.
Sometimes, when I’m actively engaged in life and have as clear a notion of myself as the next man, my mind is beset by a strange feeling of doubt: I begin to wonder if I exist, if I might not be someone else’s dream. I can imagine, with an almost carnal vividness, that I might be the character of a novel, moving within the reality constructed by a complex narrative, in the long waves of its style.”
From The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa and translated by Richard Zenith
Heather Dixon 