Fun and Luck

It is fun to imagine Fernando Pessoa picking up a napkin in a bar, scribbling a few lines in an almost illegible scribble, and throwing it, laughing, into his big trunk. And to spend his life laughing as he repeats the same scene over and over again, imagining the monstrous work he was delegating to men he has never even met. So leave a gigantic and disorganized paperwork, and to hell with the editors! It is certainly fun and tempting. However, Pessoa, who admirably turned disorganization into a method, was lucky, first, to find editors, and second, to find them competent. Anyone daring to follow his example must therefore have a lot of faith, as well as develop that enviable ability to confront a mess by accepting it as what one has devoted one’s life to producing.