Breakfast with Pessoa

from The Book of Disquiet:

"To speak is to have too much consideration for others. Both fish and Oscar Wilde die because they can't keep their mouths shut."


"Being tired of all illusions and of everything about illusions--the loss of illusions, the uselessness of having them, the prefatigue of having to have them in order to lose them, the sadness of having had them, the intellectual shame of having had them knowing that they would have to end this way." (this one reminds me of Elisa's "prenostalgia for [her] hangover")


"I frequently do not recognize myself--it's something that often happens to people who know themselves...I accompany myself in the various disguises with which I am alive. Of everything that changes, I possess that which is always the same; of all that which makes up everything, I possess that which is nothing [...]

Fatigue. Remembering is a respite, because it is doing nothing. How many times, to get better rest, have I remembered what I never was, and there is no clarity or nostalgia in my memories of the provinces [?] where I was just like those who live board to board with the floor, I oscillate the oscillation of memories, in vast halls where I never dwelt.

I turned myself into a fiction of myself to such an extent that any natural feeling that I have, of course, from the moment it's born, becomes a feeling of imagination--the memory in dreams, the dream of forgetting about the dream, knowing myself by not thinking about myself.

I stripped off my own being to such an extent that existing means dressing up. Only when I'm disguised am I really myself. And around me all unknown sunsets, as they die, gild the landscapes I shall never see."