There's something vile (and all the more vile because ridiculous) in the tendency of feeble men to make universal tragedies out of the sad comedies of their private woes.
Interpretation
The quote critiques the tendency of weak individuals to exaggerate their personal struggles into grand tragedies.
Fernando Pessoa highlights the absurdity in how some people magnify their personal difficulties, transforming minor setbacks into significant tragedies. This behavior not only reflects their weakness but also misrepresents the genuine nature of life's struggles, turning personal misfortunes into exaggerated narratives that cloud their understanding of reality.
In practice
During a support group, one might quote this to remind individuals to not let their personal struggles overwhelm them.
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.
In the matter of a difficult question it is more likely that the truth should have been discovered by the few than by the many.
Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas.
Hypocrite reader my fellow my brother!
Man, in spite of his fatal degradation, bears always the evident marks of his divine origin, in that every universal belief is always more or less true.
Agnosticism is not properly described as a "negative" creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle which is as much ethical as intellectual.
What's in store for me in the direction I don't take?
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