pg.9 "In my heart there's a peaceful anguish, and my calm is made of resignation.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a complex emotional state where peace coexists with a sense of suffering or acceptance.
Fernando Pessoa's quote reflects the duality of human emotions, highlighting how one can feel a serene acceptance while simultaneously experiencing an underlying sadness or anguish. This peaceful anguish suggests that true calmness can arise even in the face of life's inevitable disappointments, embodying the idea that resignation can also bring a form of tranquility amid turmoil.
In practice
In a discussion about coping mechanisms after loss, this quote illustrates the complexity of emotions.
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.
The only thing America respects is power and power concedes nothing. After the LA Riots, they tried to calm us down and nothing changed since.
I hope we shall . . . crush in [its] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations.
Such as are in immediate fear of a losing their estates, of banishment, or of slavery, live in perpetual anguish, and lose all appetite and repose; whereas such as are actually poor, slaves, or exiles, ofttimes live as merrily as other folk.
Why do we focus so intensely on our problems? What draws us to them? Why are they so attractive? They have the magnet power of love: somehow we desire our problems; we are in love with them much as we want to get rid of them . . . Problems sustain us -- maybe that's why they don't go away. What would a life be without them? Completely tranquilized and loveless . . . There is a secret love hiding in each problem
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth⦠there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations
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