When one of my Japanese teacups is broken, I imagine that the real cause was not the careless hand of a maid but the anxieties of the figures inhabiting the curves of that porcelain. Their grim decision to commit suicide doesn't shock me: they used the maid as one of us might use a gun.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the deeper emotional and existential causes behind seemingly trivial events.
Fernando Pessoa's quote invites us to explore the intricate relationships between our emotional state and the physical world around us. He uses the metaphor of a broken teacup to suggest that the mishap is not merely a result of carelessness but rather a manifestation of the anxieties and existential struggles that dwell within us, hinting at a connection between our inner turmoil and the outer realities we experience.
In practice
This quote can be shared in a discussion about the impact of emotional health on our daily lives.
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.
Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don't live by them at all. That's what writers are like...you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience - or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.
One pretends to do something, or copy someone or some teacher, until it can be done confidently and easily in what becomes one's own style
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.
Some men change their party for the sake of their principles; others their principles for the sake of their party
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