“I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.” ~ Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet

“Moon Path” (1957, watercolor on paper)
by Milton Avery

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“My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.” ~ Fernando Pessoa, from The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa, writing as Bernardo Soares in The Book of Disquiet:

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write . . . I’ve made myself into the character of a book, a life one reads. Whatever I feel is felt (against my will) so that I can write that I felt it. Whatever I think is promptly put into words, mixed with images that undo it, cast into rhythms that are something else altogether. From so much self-revising, I’ve destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I’m now my thoughts and not I. I plumbed myself and dropped the plumb; I spend my life wondering if I’m deep or not, with no remaining plumb except my gaze that shows me blackly vivid in the mirror at the bottom of the well—my own face that observes me observing it.
(Text 193, dated 2 September 1931)

Music by Sufjan Stevens, “All the Trees of the Field will Clap their Hands . . .”

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