October222009
(via my previous blog. this post received much attention. a surprise? sure).
This is what fools people; a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his life as if he were telling a story.
Jean Paul Sartre
Reblogged from An Existential Life.
August82009
Futile and sensitive, I’m capable of violent and consuming impulses - both good and bad, noble and vile - but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul. Everything in me tends to go on to become something else. My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me. I attend to everything, dreaming all the while. I note the slightest facial movements of the person I’m talking with, I record the subtlest inflections of his utterances; but I hear without listening, I’m thinking of something else, and what I lease catch in the conversation is the sense of what was said, by me or by him. And so I often repeat to someone what I’ve already repeated, or ask him again what he’s already answered. But I’m able to describe, in four photographic words, the facial muscles he used to say what I don’t recall, or the way he listened with his eyes to the words I don’t remember telling him. I’m two, and both keep their distance - Siamese twins that aren’t attached.
The Book of Disquiet: A Factless Autobiography by Fernando Pessoa.
Tags: /Pessoa
