Illusion of being a man

Often enough the surface and illusion catch me, their pray, and I feel like a man. Then I'm happy to be in the world, and my life is transparent. I float. And it gives me pleasure to get my pay-cheque and go home. I feel the weather without seeing it, and there's some organic sensation that pleases me. If I contemplate, I don't think. […]

But the illusion never lasts long, partly because it doesn't last and partly because night arrives. And the colours of the flower beds – it all fades and shrinks. Above this error which I feel like a man, the enormous stage setting of stars suddenly appears, as if daylight had been a curtain hiding it from view. And then my eyes forget the amorphous audience, and I wait for performers with the excitement of a child at the circus.

I'm liberated and lost.

I feel. I shiver with fever. I'm I.

The weariness caused by all illusions and all that they entail – our losing them, the uselessness of our having them, the regret of having them, the pre-weariness of having them in order to lose them. The regret of having had them, the intellectual chagrin of having had them, while knowing full well they would end.

The consciousness of life's unconsciousness is the oldest tax levied on the intelligence. There are unconscious forms of intelligence – flashes of wit, waves of understanding, mysteries and philosophies that are like body reflexes, that operate as automatically as the liver or kidneys handle their secretions.

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 68-69