In Order to Create, I Destroyed Myself
By: Fernando Pessoa
Each of us is intoxicated by different things.
There’s intoxication enough for me in just living. Drunk on feeling I drift but never stray. If it’s time to go back to work, I go to the office just like everyone else. If not, I go down to the river to stare at the waters, again just like everyone else. I’m just the same. But behind this sameness, I secretly scatter my personal firmament with stars and therein create my own infinity…
I live always in the present.
I know nothing of the future and no longer have a past. The former weighs me down with a thousand possibilities, the latter with the reality of nothingness. I have neither hopes for the future nor longings for what was…
My past is everything I never managed to become.
I created various personalities within myself. I create them constantly. Every dream, as soon as it is dreamed, is immediately embodied by another person who dreams it instead of me.
In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have externalized so much of my inner life that even inside I now exist only externally.
I am the living stage across which various actors pass acting out different plays.
You can find this passage in Fernando Pessoa’s brilliant little book — The Book of Disquiet
Most of the people who say they only live in the present are full of shit. It’s one’s of those phrases people say that sounds deep but unless you were homeless literally living on your wits, would be difficult to execute in actuality.
This piece is unique to such an extent that even if one does not understand it for exactly what it is, they still will in their own ways. Thank you for sharing this with everyone.