Fragment 2

Life is an experimental journey, made unwillingly. It is a journey of the spirit through matter, and as it’s the spirit that travels, that’s where it lives. There are, therefore, contemplative souls that have lived more intensely, more extensively, more tumultuously than others who have lived external lives. The result is everything. What they felt is what they lived. They retire as tired from a dream as from visible work. We have never lived as much as when we thought a lot.

The person in the corner of the room dances with all the dancers. They see everything, and because they see everything, they live everything. As everything is ultimately a feeling we feel, contact with a body is worth as much as seeing it, or even simply remembering it.

I dance, therefore, when I see dancing. I say, like the English poet who tells us about seeing the three reapers lying on the grass in the distance: ‘A fourth is reaping, and that one is me’.

All this, which has been said as much as thought, comes from an immense fatigue, with no apparent cause, which settled on me today suddenly. I’m not just tired, I am embittered, and the bitterness is unknown as well. I am on the brink of tears in anguish—not tears that we cry, but tears that we repress, tears of a disease of the soul, not of a sensitive pain.

I have lived so much without having lived! I have thought so much without having thought! Adventures I have had without moving in still, violent worlds weigh on me. I am fed up that I have never had and will never have, tired of the gods for existing. I carry the wounds of all the battles I avoided with me. My muscular body is crushed from the effort I never even thought about making.

Dull, mute, null... The sky above is a dead, imperfect summer. I look at it as if it weren't there. I sleep what I think, I lie walking, I suffer without feeling. My great nostalgia is for nothing, it is nothing, like the sky above that I don’t see, which I am staring at impersonally.

— Fernando Pessoa

Translated by Lauren Elstob for