Pessoa

New York Times has a report on an upcoming auction of Fernando Pessoa's private papers and the resulting distress felt by Portuguese intellectuals and general public at the prospect of those papers leaving the country.

The article contains some interesting comments. Like this one

Jerónimo Pizarro is the young Pessoa scholar whom the heirs have allowed to photograph the papers they have. “Pessoa’s like a shadow, an invisible man,” he said. “He wrote about being the center of a center where there was nothing.”

or this from Jose Saramago's The History of the Siege of Lisbon (which I need to read alongwith The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, another saramago novel based on another one of Pessoa's heteronyms)

“Raimundo Silva,” Mr. Saramago writes, “thought to himself, in the manner of Fernando Pessoa, If I smoked, I should now light a cigarette, watching the river, thinking how vague and uncertain everything is, but, not smoking, I should simply think that everything is truly uncertain and vague, without a cigarette, even though the cigarette, were I to smoke it, would in itself express the uncertainty and vagueness of things, like smoke itself, were I to smoke.”

And finally some from Pessoa himself (or rather from Bernardo Soares). From The Book of Disquiet...

I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.

Nothing would bother me more than if they found me strange at the office. I like to revel in the irony that they don't find me at all strange. I like the hair shirt of being being regarded by them as their equal. I like the crucifixion of being considered no different. There are martyrdoms more subtle than those recorded for the saints and hermits. There are torments of our mental awareness as there are of the body and of desire. And in the former, as in the latter, there's a certain sensuality....

Also this one... I think I had copied it on the blog before too but just in case. I find it very funny and very sad (like he says himself).

[But] as an ironic spectator of myself, I've never lost interest in seeing what life brings. And since I now know beforehand that every vague hope will end in disillusion, I have the special delight of already enjoying the disillusion with the hope, like the bitter with the sweet that makes the sweet sweeter by way of contrast. I'm a sullen strategist who, having never won a battle, has learned to derive pleasure from mapping out the details of his inevitable retreat on the eve of each new engagement.

My destiny, which has pursued me like a malevolent creature , is to be able to desire only what I know I'll never get. If I see the nubile figure of a girl in the street and imagine for the slightest moment, however nonchalantly, what it would be like if she were mine, it's a dead certainty that ten steps past my dream she'll meet the man who's obviously her husband or lover. A romantic would make tragedy out of this; a stranger to the situation would see it as a comedy; I, however, mix the two things, since I'm romantic in myself and a stranger to myself, and turn to page to yet another irony.