I wanted to sing the unsung, but the unsung has already been sung, by Fernando Pessoa, who I discovered via Comedies, Conjectures, making the whole blogging project meaningful and eternally validated.After a misspent childhood, youth, manhood and middle-age, I spend my remaining years redoing, reviewing, retracing my own footsteps so that now, ageless, I discover something I sought all those years, a mentor, hero, role-model. Which has its pluses and minuses. He (one’s hero) makes one feel validated, justified, not alone, even if he died in 1935. On the other hand, he takes away one’s motivation. What can one say that he has not said already? He dares to say what one thought but never dared express, what one feels sometimes but tends to remain silent till it blows over:
“Clouds . . . I question myself without knowing myself. I have achieved nothing useful, shall never know anything I could justify. That part of my life which I have not wasted in a confused interpretation of non-existent things, I have frittered away in writing prose-poetry, dedicated to untransmittable feelings, through which I make the universe mine. ”
and writes poems that express what I had thought but never considered writing and if I had would never have written as simply and beautifully:
“If I could sink my teeth into the whole earth
And actually taste it,
I’d be happier for a moment . . .
But I don’t always want to be happy.
To be unhappy now and then
Is part of being natural.
. . . ”
And from a fellow-blogger I read this, from another Pessoa poem, presumably like my other extracts translated from the Portuguese:
Oh, what a pleasure
not to follow a duty!
To have a book
and not read it!
Reading is boring.
Studying is nothing.
The sun shines without literature.
Rivers run without original editions.
And the breeze, so natural to the morning, has plenty of time, and no rush . . .
to which I commented, in the effusiveness of one who’s in love with something or other, perhaps life itself in its fullness:
“I love this, your presenting the poem, and the sentiments of Fernando Pessoa, two of whose books I have bought (The Book of Disquiet and Selected Poems: A Little Larger than the Entire Universe) which blow my mind so gloriously that I am not devouring them, merely treasuring their existence; for I will possess the discovery of Pessoa for the rest of my life. And I bless you for giving Pessoa this public airing.”
5 comments:
I was touched by something like this while driving to work this morning. I noticed a flock of birds over the highway as we all maneuvered for lane position.
The birds scattered a bit after their flight path was disturbed by the wake of a large truck. They gracefully gathered back into formation.
There was something about that moment that took me to another place. I appreciated it for what it was.
These snippets indicate a man who is as gentle as a breeze, listless and a wind, yet has his feet comfortably in his time and space. It is rather nice not to be angst-ridden.
oops "listless as a wind". (I wish there was an editing facility for comments).
Charles, I am taken to another place even by your description of the event, thinking of all the years I have driven to work - sometimes it has taken two or three hours each way, mostly stuck in jams on the M25 which circles London, and how I really don't like being trapped in a vehicle. How I would have envied the birds! I would have wanted to abandon my car for ever, leave it with the engine still on, blocking a lane on the highway, to get away from there and never drive again.
ZACL, yes, there should be an editing facility. Some places have one and it operates for a certain period, because obviously it's difficult to respond to someone whose comments keep changing. Whereas you've had to cope with my disappearing comment on yours! Let us kiss and make up ZACL or at least let me stop fighting against your expressions against a man whom I saw as a proxy for myself, some alter ego!
Enough. You have caught Pessoa instantly in your well-chosen words
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