Thanks to Fernando Pessoa, I have traveled paths I never imagined. I am moving forward over repulsions, over fears, over lack of interest, and I find myself oscillating between indifference and curiosity. An intellectual curiosity, it is true. And then? Then possibilities opened up for me, so to speak, and the intellectual horizon of the poet proved to be wider than I thought. A vocation demands regular and variegated affirmations, it has to strengthen itself through diverse elements of reality, that is, it has to affirm itself by them, absorbing them into itself. And it seems to me that Pessoa’s unusual paths contributed greatly to his becoming what he is—in other words, to his achieving a very rare degree of affirmation.
Tag: literature
The Multiplicity
In art, the trait that perhaps most impresses and most characterizes true geniuses is the multiplicity. If we take the example of a Fernando Pessoa or a Shakespeare, and analyze their work, it seems incredible that such varied manifestations have come from the same mind. That is to say: if, while we read, we pay attention not to the work, but to the mind that generated it, trying to understand its motivations and intentions, we are impressed to notice how it contains oscillations that are sometimes antagonistic, and how it manages to express them clearly and powerfully. It is as if, confronting it with an ordinary mind, we notice that, on one side, there is a vicious and lukewarm character, and on the other side, there is a limitless creative potentiality.
Written Lines Are the Record in Time of Lasting Impressions or Not
The careful reading of several volumes in sequence by Mário Ferreira dos Santos impacted me so strongly that I had the impulse to go through all my notes looking for nonsense. However, this is an impulse I cannot allow. To revise my past is to destroy what I was, to erase the traces of a possible evolution. Written lines are the record in time of lasting impressions or not: but they are, nevertheless, the evidence of the path traveled. To suppress what I was is to distort what I am: a justifiable action, not in the minds of those obsessed with perfect coherence, but in the minds of impostors and scoundrels.
Timeless Themes
Particularly, I restrict my art to themes that I consider to be timeless. This, in other words, means that I flatly refuse a detailed analysis of the values of this time, because I do not want to infest my literature with such a despicable and despicable moral. One will do well in the future if one never pays attention to the sociological-moral currents that this century has spawned, which are nothing but shamefully infamous ideologies, stupid lapses in the history of human thought.