A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?
Interpretation
The quote reflects on self-perception and the loss of emotional depth with age.
In this contemplative quote, Fernando Pessoa explores the complexities of self-identity and introspection as one ages. He illustrates a sense of loss regarding imagination and emotional intelligence, while also questioning the nature of his own existence and perception, wondering how one can observe oneself from an external standpoint and what that reveals about their inner depths.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a philosophical discussion on the nature of self and identity.
I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.
It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.
We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.
I never understood why when you died, you didn't just vanish, everything could just keep going on the way it was only you just wouldn't be there. I always thought I'd like my own tombstone to be blank. No epitaph, and no name. Well, actually, I'd like it to say 'figment.'
I am neither a sociologist nor a politician. All I can do is imagine for myself what the future will be like.
That which looks for mercy from an opponent is not non-violence.
In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.
Worse than despair,_x000D_ _x000D_ Worse than the bitterness of death, is hope.
What pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death.
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