Silence emerges from the sound of rain and spreads in a crescendo of gray monotony over the narrow street I contemplate. I’m sleeping while awake, standing by the window, leaning against it as against everything. I search in myself for the sensations I feel before these falling threads of darkly luminous water that stand out from the grimy building facades and especially from the open windows. And I don’t know what I feel or what I want to feel. I don’t know what to think or where I am.
Interpretation
The quote reflects a deep state of introspection amidst the monotony and quiet of rain.
In this quote, Fernando Pessoa captures a moment of existential reflection where the sound and sight of rain evoke a complex mixture of sensations and emotions. The imagery of the rain and the act of standing by the window symbolize a contemplative state, as the narrator grapples with feelings of confusion, uncertainty, and a sense of disconnection from their surroundings. It portrays the tranquil yet profound experience of being lost in thought while engaged with the world around them.
In practice
This quote could be used in a literary discussion about the role of weather in literature.
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 history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.
Racism is predictable. It's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races.
Where to begin? Do we measure the relaxing of the feet? The moment when the eye glimpses the hawk, when instinct functions? For in this pure action, this pure moving of the bird, there is no time, no space, but only the free doing-being of this very moment -now!
"I should hope so," Laigle replied, "for my coat and I live comfortably together. It has assumed all my wrinkles, does not hurt me anywhere, has moulded itself on my deformities, and is complacent to all my movements, and 1 only feel its presence because it keeps me warm."
The truest test of independent judgment is being able to dislike someone who admires us, and to admire someone who dislikes us.
While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God's creation.
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