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.
Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
I only have 'yes' men around me. Who needs 'no' men?
If the universe is everything, and scientists say that the universe is expanding, what is it expanding into?
The whole blear world of smoke and twisted steel around my head in a railroad car, and my mind wandering past the rust into futurity: I saw the sun go down in a carnal and primeval world, leaving darkness to cover my railroad train because the other side of the world was waiting for dawn.
Nothing is poetical if plain daylight is not poetical; and no monster should amaze us if the normal man does not amaze.
He will essentially follow the language of the spectacle, for it is the only one he is familiar with.
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