Malady of being conscious

I raise my head from the sheet of paper where I'm writing … It's early still. It's just past noon on a Sunday. Life's basic malady, that of being conscious, begins with my body and discomforts me. To have no islands where those of us who are uncomfortable could go, no ancient garden paths reserved for those who've retreated into dreaming! To have to live and to act hoverer little; to have to be here writing this, because my soul needs it, and not to be able to just dream it all, to express it without words, without so much as consciousness, through a construction of myself in music and diffuseness, such that tears would well in my eyes as soon as I felt like expressing myself, ever further into unconsciousness and the Far-away, to the and but God.

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 90

The only thing I've desired is what I couldn't even imagine

The only thing I've loved is nothing at all. The only thing I've desired is what I couldn't even imagine. All I asked of life is that it go on by without my feeling it. All I demanded of love is that it never stop being a distant dream. In my own inner landscapes, all of them unreal, I've always been attracted to what's in the distance, and the hazy aqueducts – almost out of sight in my dreamed landscapes – had a dreamy sweetness in relation to the rest of the landscape, a sweetness that enabled me to love them.

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 88

Saints

It is impossible to please everybody, they say. And so that is perhaps why Saints who should be, one supposes, good enough to please everybody, are always dead. For then only the skeleton is left and everyone is free to make of them what he, in person, likes, and the Saints do not appear to confute such opinion.
(Aug. 50)

The recognition of a saint (and not only of a saint) requires two things: that the saint should be held to behave within certain prescribed limits of behaviour, and that people should have the will and capacity to recognize such behaviour. (Aug. 50)

Nanamoli Thera

One of our modes of existence

Perhaps it will be discovered that what we call God, so obviously on a plane beyond logic and space-time reality, is one of our modes of existence, a sensation of ourselves in another dimension of being. This seems to me perfectly possible. Perhaps dreams are yet another dimension which we live, or perhaps, they're a cross between two dimensions. As our body lives in length, in breadth, and in space – in space through their visible representation, in the ideal through their non-material essence, and in the ego through their personal dimension as something intimately ours. The ego itself, the I in each one of us, is perhaps a divine dimension. All of this is complex and will no doubt be determined in its time. Today's dreamers are perhaps the great precursors of the ultimate science of the future. Of course I don't believe in an ultimate science of the future, but that's beside the point.

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 74-75

On the 20th storey of a burning house

One is, as it were, on the 20th storey of a burning house, and from the window there is a narrow plank leading across the street to the balcony of an —apparently — safe building opposite. (The Building Opposite whose blinds are always down, whose chimneys never smoke, whose doors never open, where no light is seen at night, about which there has been one's frequent yet always inconclusive speculation.) To stay is to be burned for certain. By attempting the plank one will probably fall — still one knows one will have to walk that plank or burn.

Osbert Moore (1948, Nov.)

Plotinus, the philosopher our contemporary, seemed ashamed of being in the body.

So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace.

He showed, too, an unconquerable reluctance to sit to a painter of a sculptor, and when Amelius persisted in urging him to allow of a portrait being made he asked him, 'Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us? Do you really think I must also consent to leave, as a desired spectacle to posterity, an image of the image?'

Porphyry: On the Life of Plotinus and the Arrangement of his Work

from Plotinus: The Enneads translated by Stephen MacKenna

If I had a child ...

If I had a child what could I say to him ? "My child," I could say. "you are here in this world because of my own pleasure and incontinence. I can offer you nothing better than become another 'little man' like myself whom it is the present fashion for politicians and the like to idolize en masse and exploit and ignore as an individual. If you succeed in 'improving' your position this can only be at the expense of others and will increase its instability. If your position deteriorates it will be at your own expense. In a few years time you will, no doubt, be repeating these very words." (1949)

Nanamoli Thera

Five specific limitations of the infinite

The so-called seven colours of the spectrum together go to make up what is known as light — what, in other words, the scientists say is no more than a mere fractional band in the whole range of electro-magnetic waves— the only section of the wave-range which the visual sense can directly grasp. Indeed each colour is experienced as a particular limitation of light: light itself appears to be a particular limitation of the electro- magnetic wave-range. So would the five senses seem to be five specific limitations of the infinite— five exclusive ways of screening off, of shutting out the rest. In fact, the "outer world", as known through the senses, seems to be conditioned by — shall one say our knowledge of it depends on —the limiting and sifting qualities of our five senses. By means of sifting and excluding, form could be said to be created from Chaos and thus our five senses are at the same time five creators and five ways of being partially blind. We live, as it were, in a cathedral with stained windows whose, to us, magnificent colour patterns let in a little of the light which the sun sheds indiscriminately outside. (1947)

(Later addition:) But the "sun" would then stand for Chaos in our simile and how would that be wrong ?

Nanamoli Thera

To be no more, have no more, want no more …

To posses in the shade, that nobility of spirit that makes no demands on life. To be in the whirl of the worlds like dust of flowers, sailing through the afternoon air on unknown wind and falling, in the torpor of dusk, wherever it falls, lost among larger things. To be this with a sure understanding, neither happy nor sad, grateful to the sun for its brilliance and to the stars for their remoteness. To be no more, have no more, want no more … The music of the hungry beggar, the song of blind man, the relic of the unknown wayfarer, the tracks in the desert of the camel without burden or destination …

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet

translation: Richard Zenith

p. 46

Wandering on deserted places ...

Wandering on deserted places, there are found many traces, and tracts, from which we deduce the movements of heros and gods and so we weave history. Yet were our vision to become a little clearer, we might discover that all this tracts are merely made by ourselves during our own earlier wonderings.

Nanamoli Thera

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

What hours, what memories!

Shall I ever enjoy again those marvelous reveries of past days, as, for instance, once, when I was still quite a youth, in the early dawn, sitting among the ruins of the castle of Faucigny; another time in the mountains above Lavey, under the midday sun, lying under a tree and visited by three butterflies; and again another night on the sandy shore of the North Sea, stretched full length upon the beach, my eyes wandering over the Milky Way? Will they ever return to me, those grandiose, immortal, cosmogonic dreams, in which one seems to carry the world in one's breast, to touch the stars, to possess the infinite? Divine moments, hours of ecstasy, when thought flies from world to world, penetrates the great enigma, breathes with a respiration large, tranquil, and profound, like that of the ocean, and hovers serene and boundless like the blue heaven! Visits from the muse, Urania, who traces around the foreheads of those she loves the phosphorescent nimbus of contemplative power, and who pours into their hearts the tranquil intoxication, if not the authority of genius, moments of irresistible intuition in which a man feels himself great like the universe and calm like a god! From the celestial spheres down to the shell or the moss, the whole of creation is then submitted to our gaze, lives in our breast, and accomplishes in us its eternal work with the regularity of destiny and the passionate ardor of love. What hours, what memories! The traces which remain to us of them are enough to fill us with respect and enthusiasm, as though they had been visits of the Holy Spirit. And then, to fall back again from these heights with their boundless horizons into the muddy ruts of triviality! what a fall! Poor Moses! Thou too sawest undulating in the distance the ravishing hills of the promised land, and it was thy fate nevertheless to lay thy weary bones in a grave dug in the desert! Which of us has not his promised land, his day of ecstasy and his death in exile? What a pale counterfeit is real life of the life we see in glimpses, and how these flaming lightnings of our prophetic youth make the twilight of our dull monotonous manhood more dark and dreary!

Amiel's Journal

In this vacuous world ...

Some are exploited by God himself, and they are prophets and saints in this vacuous world.

Pessoa

Resignation

April 26, 1852.—This evening a feeling of emptiness took possession of me; and the solemn ideas of duty, the future, solitude, pressed themselves upon me. I gave myself to meditation, a very necessary defense against the dispersion and distraction brought about by the day's work and its detail. Read a part of Krause's book “Urbild der Menschheit” [Footnote: Christian Frederick Krause, died 1832, Hegel's younger contemporary, and the author of a system which he called panentheism—Amiel alludes to it later on.] which answered marvelously to my thought and my need. This philosopher has always a beneficent effect upon me; his sweet religious serenity gains upon me and invades me. He inspires me with a sense of peace and infinity. Still I miss something, common worship, a positive religion, shared with other people. Ah! when will the church to which I belong in heart rise into being? I cannot like Scherer, content myself with being in the right all alone. I must have a less solitary Christianity. My religious needs are not satisfied any more than my social needs, or my needs of affection. Generally I am able to forget them and lull them to sleep. But at times they wake up with a sort of painful bitterness ... I waver between languor and ennui, between frittering myself away on the infinitely little, and longing after what is unknown and distant. It is like the situation which French novelists are so fond of, the story of a vie de province; only the province is all that is not the country of the soul, every place where the heart feels itself strange, dissatisfied, restless and thirsty. Alas! Well understood, this place is the earth, this country of one's dreams is heaven, and this suffering is the eternal homesickness, the thirst for happiness.

“In der Beschraenkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,” says Goethe. Male resignation, this also is the motto of those who are masters of the art of life; “manly,” that is to say, courageous, active, resolute, persevering, “resignation,” that is to say, self−sacrifice, renunciation, limitation. Energy in resignation, there lies the wisdom of the sons of earth, the only serenity possible in this life of struggle and of combat. In it is the peace of martyrdom, in it too the promise of triumph.

Amiel's Journal

In the caves of withdrawal from the world

The nocturnal glory of being without being anything! The sombre majesty of splendors no one knows.… And I suddenly experience the sublime feeling of a monk in the wilderness or of a hermit in his retreat, acquainted with the substance of Christ in the sands and in the caves of withdrawal from the world.

Fernando Pessoa

The Book of Disquiet, p. 15

translation: Richard Zenith

If the aim of life is to teach us renunciation ...

I wish to fulfill my duty, but where is it, what is it? Here inclination comes in again and interprets the oracle. And the ultimate question is this: Does duty consist in obeying one's nature, even the best and most spiritual? or in conquering it?

Life, is it essentially the education of the mind and intelligence, or that of the will? And does will show itself in strength or in resignation? If the aim of life is to teach us renunciation, then welcome sickness, hindrances, sufferings of every kind! But if its aim is to produce the perfect man, then one must watch over one's integrity of mind and body. To court trial is to tempt God. At bottom, the God of justice veils from me the God of love. I tremble instead of trusting.

Whenever conscience speaks with a divided, uncertain, and disputed voice, it is not yet the voice of God. Descend still deeper into yourself, until you hear nothing but a clear and undivided voice, a voice which does away with doubt and brings with it persuasion, light and serenity. Happy, says the apostle, are they who are at peace with themselves, and whose heart condemneth them not in the part they take. This inner identity, this unity of conviction, is all the more difficult the more the mind analyzes, discriminates, and foresees. It is difficult, indeed, for liberty to return to the frank unity of instinct.

Alas! we must then re−climb a thousand times the peaks already scaled, and reconquer the points of view already won, we must fight the fight! The human heart, like kings, signs mere truces under a pretence of perpetual peace. The eternal life is eternally to be re−won. Alas, yes! peace itself is a struggle, or rather it is struggle and activity which are the law. We only find rest in effort, as the flame only finds existence in combustion. O Heraclitus! the symbol of happiness is after all the same as that of grief; anxiety and hope, hell and heaven, are equally restless. The altar of Vesta and the sacrifice of Beelzebub burn with the same fire. Ah, yes, there you have life—life double−faced and double−edged. The fire which enlightens is also the fire which consumes; the element of the gods may become that of the accursed.

Amiel's Journal