Fragment 1

When there is no other virtue in me, at least there is the perpetual novelty of unfettered feeling.

When walking down Rua Nova do Almada today, I suddenly noticed the back of the man who was walking ahead of me. It was the back of any ordinary man, a modest suit jacket on the back of a casual passer-by. He carried an old briefcase in his left hand and tapped on the ground to the rhythm of his steps with an umbrella, which he carried by the handle in his right hand. I suddenly felt something approaching tenderness for this man.

In him, I felt the tenderness one feels for common, human mundanity, for the everyday banality of the head of a family going to work, for his humble, happy home, for the happy and sad pleasures that inevitably make up his life, for the innocence of living without analysing, for the animal ease of that clothed back.

The feeling was exactly identical to the one that hits us when we see someone sleeping. Everything that sleeps is a child again. Perhaps because in sleep no harm can be done, and if they are unaware of life, the biggest criminal, the most self-absorbed egotist, is sacred, because of a natural magic when they sleep. Between killing someone sleeping and killing a child I don’t know what the difference is.

— Fernando Pessoa

Translated by Lauren Elstob for