What’s Become of the Living?
By: Fernando Pessoa
Because I am nothing, I can imagine myself to be anything. If I were somebody, I wouldn’t be able to.
An assistant book-keeper can imagine himself to be a Roman emperor; the King of England can’t do that, because the King of England has lost the ability in his dreams to be any other king than the one he is.
His reality limits what he can feel…
The life I drag around with me until night falls is not dissimilar to that of the streets themselves. By day they are full of meaningless bustle and by night full of an equally meaningless lack of bustle.
By day I am nothing, by night I am myself.
There is no difference between me and the streets around the Alfândega, except that they are streets and I am a human soul, and this, when weighed against the essence of all things, might also count for little.
I drift, without thoughts or emotions, attending only to my senses.
I woke up early and came out to wander aimlessly through the streets. I observe them meditatively. I see them with my thoughts. And, absurdly, a light mist of emotion rises within me; the fog that is lifting from the outside world seems slowly to be seeping into me.
I advance slowly, a dead man, and my vision, no longer my own, is nothing now: it is merely that of a human animal who unwittingly inherited Greek culture, Roman order, Christian morality and all the other illusions that make up the civilization in which I live and feel.
What’s become of the living?
You can find this passage in Pessoa’s profoundly poetic book — The Book of Disquiet.
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By day I am nothing, by night I am myself.
I read The Book of Disquiet when I was in Lisbon, and like an absolute cliche read a few sections in 'his' seat in the cafe he used to go to in Baixo Chaido, where they've got a statue of him outside.
He reminds me of Kafka - both clerks who had rich internal worlds, who had alternate identities that didn't conform to the office settings where they work.
Which, you know, seems like a lot of us, these days.