A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe

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by Fernando Pessoa

Dialogue in the night

  What metaphysical horror you arouse in me,

  Not mentally but viscerally!

  O vile metaphysics of the horror of flesh,

  The fear of love . . .

  Between your body and my desire for it

  Stretches the chasm of you being conscious.

  If only I could love and possess you

  Without you existing or being there!

  Ah, my solitary habit of thinking

  So exiles the animal in me

  That I dare not dare what the vilest creature

  Of this vile world does automatically!

  I’ve so concealed my instinctive nature

  From human seeing that I don’t know

  How to reveal, in gestures and manners,

  A single instinct to observing eyes,

  How to make my body and behavior

  Bear witness to who I am! If only

  You were blind, O eyes and hands of others!

  I don’t even know how, in soul or body,

  To be naked to others! Eternal solitude . . .

  The secret of Seeking is that nothing’s found.

  Eternal worlds endlessly and unceasingly

  Keep spinning in vain, one inside another.

  There’s us, and the Gods, and the Gods of Gods,

  And we’re so interspersed and lost in them

  That we can’t even find ourselves in infinity.

  Nothing’s ever the same, and the uncertain

  Light of supreme truth is always ahead

  Of where men and gods go.

  Ah, everything is symbol and analogy!

  The wind that blows and the night that chills

  Are something other than night and wind—

  Shadows of life and of thought.

  Everything we see is something else.

  The sweeping tide, the raging tide,

  Is the echo of another tide that flows

  Where the world is really real.

  All we have is forgetfulness.

  The cold night and the wind’s blowing

  Are shadows of the hands whose motions

  Are the mother illusion of this illusion.

  Endlessly condemned to eternal error—

  Might not this be our reality? Might not

  The abstract and infinitely veiled world

  Be an eternal delusion, destined

  To remain forever veiled and abstract,

  Its very unity an inexactness,

  An indefinite whole, and more than a whole,

  Where the fixed points of truth and error

  Are but a greater error?

  Everything transcends everything.

  Inwardly and infinitely

  Far from itself, the universe,

  By existing, deceives itself.

  The supreme mystery of the Universe,

  The only mystery at all, and in all,

  Is the existence of a mystery of the universe,

  It’s the existence of the universe, of anything,

  It’s the existence of existence. O hazy, abstract form

  Which existence so often assumes in me,

  The mere thought of this is a chill wind in my body

  Blowing from beyond the earth and grave

  And going from my soul to God.

  In me

  I step up to the brink of myself and look down . . .

  An abyss . . . In that abyss the Universe

  With its Time and Space is a star, and there are

  Other universes in the abyss, other

  Forms of Being with other Times and Spaces,

  And other lives different from this life . . .

  The spirit is also a star . . . The God we ponder

  Is a sun . . . And there are more Gods, more spirits

  Belonging to other kinds of Reality . . .

  I hurl myself into the abyss and remain

  In myself . . . And never descend . . . I shut my eyes

  And dream—and I wake up to Nature . . .

  Thus I return to myself and to Life . . .

  Ah, to drink life in one gulp, a gulp

  Containing all of life’s sensations

  In all their forms, good and bad,

  Troubles, pleasures and occupations,

  All places, journeys, explorations,

  All crimes, lusts, and forms of decadence!

  In the past I wanted

  To revel in trees and flowers,

  To dream of cliffs, seas and solitude,

  But today I shun that crazy idea:

  Anything that brings me close to the Mystery

  Racks me with horror. Today I want only

  Sensations, lots and lots of sensations,

  Of everything and everyone in the world—

  Not the sensations of pantheist deliriums

  But perpetual shocks of human pleasure,

  With my personality always changing

  To synthesize them in one stream of feeling.

  I want to drown in turmoil, light and voices

  —In tumultuously commonplace things—

  This feeling of desolation that fills

  And overwhelms me.

  How I would rejoice

  To experience in one day, one hour, one gulp

  The sum total of all vices, even if

  It meant I’d be eternally condemned

  —Ah, what madness!—to hell itself!

  ENGLISH POEMS

  These poems contain, here and there, certain eccentricities and peculiarities of expression; do not attribute these to the circumstance of my being a foreigner, nor indeed consider me a foreigner in your judgement of these poems. I practice the same thing, to a far higher degree, in Portuguese. (. . .)

  The fact is that these are forms of expression necessarily created by an extreme pantheistic attitude, which, as it breaks the limits of definite thought, so must violate the rules of logical meaning.

  (FROM A COVER LETTER SENT BY PESSOA WITH SIXTEEN POEMS TO AN ENGLISH PUBLISHER ON 23 OCTOBER 1915)

  POEMS OF ALEXANDER SEARCH

  EPIGRAM

  “I love my dreams,” I said, a winter morn,

  To the practical man, and he, in scorn,

  Replied: “I am no slave of the Ideal,

  But, as all men of sense, I love the Real.”

  Poor fool, mistaking all that is and seems!

  I love the Real when I love my dreams.

  [1906]

  GOD’S WORK

  “God’s work—how great his power!” said he

  As we gazed out upon the sea

  Beating the beach tumultuously

  Round the land-head.

  The vessel then strikes with a crash,

  Over her deck the waters rash

  Make horror deep in rent and gash.

  “God’s work,” I said.

  JULY 1906

  THE CIRCLE

  I traced a circle on the ground,

  It was a mystic figure strange

  Wherein I thought there would abound

  Mute symbols adequate of change,

  And complex formulas of Law,

  Which is the jaws of Change’s maw.

  My simpler thoughts in vain had stemmed

  The current of this madness free,

  But that my thinking is condemned

  To symbol and analogy:

  I deemed a circle might condense

  With calm all mystery’s violence.

  And so in cabalistic mood

  A circle traced I curious there;

  Imperfect the made circle stood

  Though formèd with minutest care.

  From Magic’s failure deeply I

  A lesson took to make me sigh.

  30 JULY 1907

  A TEMPLE

  I have built my temple—wall and face—

  Outside the idea of space,

  Complex-built as a full-rigged ship;

  I made its walls of my fears,

  Its
turrets many of weird thoughts and tears—

  And that strange temple, thus unfurled

  Like a death’s-head flag, that like a whip

  Stinging around my soul is curled,

  Is far more real than the world.

  AUGUST 1907

  from 35 SONNETS

  I

  Whether we write or speak or are but seen

  We are ever unapparent. What we are

  Cannot be transfused into word or mien.

  Our soul from us is infinitely far.

  However much we give our thoughts the will

  To make our soul with arts of self-show stored,

  Our hearts are incommunicable still.

  In what we show ourselves we are ignored.

  The abyss from soul to soul cannot be bridged

  By any skill or thought or trick for seeing.

  Unto our very selves we are abridged

  When we would utter to our thought our being.

  We are our dreams of ourselves, souls by gleams,

  And each to each other dreams of others’ dreams.

  [AUGUST 1910]

  VIII

  How many masks wear we, and undermasks,

  Upon our countenance of soul, and when,

  If for self-sport the soul itself unmasks,

  Knows it the last mask off and the face plain?

  The true mask feels no inside to the mask

  But looks out of the mask by co-masked eyes.

  Whatever consciousness begins the task

  The task’s accepted use to sleepness ties.

  Like a child frighted by its mirrored faces,

  Our souls, that children are, being thought-losing,

  Foist otherness upon their seen grimaces

  And get a whole world on their forgot causing;

  And, when as thought would unmask our soul’s masking,

  Itself goes unmasked to the unmasking.

  [MAY 1912]

  XVII

  My love, and not I, is the egoist.

  My love for thee loves itself more than thee;

  Ay, more than me, in whom it doth exist,

  And makes me live that it may feed on me.

  In the country of bridges the bridge is

  More real than the shores it doth unsever;

  So in our world, all of Relation, this

  Is true—that truer is Love than either lover.

  This thought therefore comes lightly to Doubt’s door—

  If we, seeing substance of this world, are not

  Mere Intervals, God’s Absence and no more,

  Hollows in real Consciousness and Thought.

  And if ’tis possible to Thought to bear this fruit,

  Why should it not be possible to Truth?

  9 JULY 1912

  XXXI

  I am older than Nature and her Time

  By all the timeless age of Consciousness,

  And my adult oblivion of the clime

  Where I was born makes me not countryless.

  An exile’s yearnings through my thoughts escape

  For daylight of that land where once I dreamed,

  Which I cannot recall in colour or shape

  But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed

  And yet is not as light rememberèd,

  Nor to the left or to the right conceived;

  And all round me tastes as if life were dead

  And the world made but to be disbelieved.

  Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet

  How but by hope do I the unknown truth get?

  24 DECEMBER 1912

  from THE MAD FIDDLER

  THE LOST KEY

  Set out from sight of shore!

  Grow tired of every sea!

  All things are ever more

  Than most they seem to be.

  What steps are those that pass outside my door?

  Fail out from shape and thought!

  Let sense and feeling fade!

  O sadness overwrought

  With joy till bliss is strayed!

  What birds are those that my swift window shade?

  But be those steps no steps,

  And be those birds dreamed wings,

  Still one ache oversteps

  The life to which it clings,

  Though to know what ache no step in me helps

  And what this pang is no bird in me sings.

  8 FEBRUARY 1913

  THE KING OF GAPS

  There lived, I know not when, never perhaps—

  But the fact is he lived—an unknown king

  Whose kingdom was the strange Kingdom of Gaps.

  He was lord of what is twixt thing and thing,

  Of interbeings, of that part of us

  That lies between our waking and our sleep,

  Between our silence and our speech, between

  Us and the consciousness of us; and thus

  A strange mute kingdom did that weird king keep

  Sequestered from our thought of time and scene.

  Those supreme purposes that never reach

  The deed—between them and the deed undone

  He rules, uncrowned. He is the mystery which

  Is between eyes and sight, nor blind nor seeing.

  Himself is never ended nor begun,

  Above his own void presence empty shelf.

  All He is but a chasm in his own being,

  The lidless box holding not-being’s no-pelf.

  All think that he is God, except himself.

  17 FEBRUARY 1913

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  The Introduction and Chronology were first published, with slight differences, in A MáscaraeoEspelho (Lisbon: Instituto Camões, 2004). All the translations are my own. The literary excerpts are taken from the volume in hand, from Fernando Pessoa & Co.—Selected Poems (New York: Grove Press, 1998), and from The Book of Disquiet (New York: Penguin, 2003). Most of the quotations from Pessoa’s letters and other writings can be found in The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa (Grove Press, 2001).

  ALBERTO CAEIRO

  The Keeper of Sheep. When the editors of the Coimbra-based magazine Presença, in which Pessoa published some of his most memorable poems and prose pieces, told him they wanted to publish a volume of his poetry, this was the work he promised to send them. In a letter to one of the editors dated 25 February 1933, he called The Keeper of Sheep “the best thing I’ve done—a work which . . . I could never match, even if I were to write another Iliad, for it springs from a type and degree of inspiration (here the word may be used, for it’s perfectly accurate) that surpasses what in myself I could rationally generate, which would never be true of any Iliad.” He expected to deliver the manuscript forthwith, as it needed only some minor revisions. But despite the insistence of the editors, he never got the book into final shape. He published half of its forty-nine poems in magazines, but the other half continued to hesitate, as it were, in a notebook where he kept tinkering, jotting down variant phrasings, adding or subtracting verses, and calling into question certain passages and even entire poems.

  The following poems were published in the magazine Athena 4, in 1925: IX, XIII, XXVIII, XXX, XXXV, XLIII, XLV, XLVI, XLVIII, XLIX.

  II Variants of “My gaze is” in v. 1: “In my gaze everything is”; “Everything I see is.” Variants of “completely” in v. 12: “endlessly”; “suddenly.”

  IV St. Barbara is invoked for protection against storms. Variant of “Is a sudden noise / That begins with light . . .” in the penultimate stanza: “Is a bunch of angry / People above us. . . .”

  VI My reading of the manuscript differs, in the last verse, from the published version.

  VII My reading of the manuscript differs, in the penultimate verse, from the published version.

  VIII Published in Presença 30, in 1931.

  XIV Variant of “rarely” in v. 2: “never.” Variant of “divine” in v. 5: “natural.”

  XVI This and the
following poem are the only Caeiro poems that rhyme (in the original).

  XXI Between the second and third verses, the manuscript contains the following, subsequently added, verse, “And if the earth were something to munch on,” marked by a symbol indicating doubts about its inclusion.

  XXVII Variant of the last verse: “I enjoy it all like someone in the sunlight.”

  XXXIII Variant of “true” in v. 3: “good.” Variant of “coloring” in v. 4: “smile.” Variants of the last verse: “To see if they talked”; “To see if they moved”; “To see what they would do”; “To see whom they belonged to.”

  XXXIV Variant of vv. 13-15: “If it is, then well and good . . . / What does it matter to me?”

  XXXVI Variant of “true” in v. 7: “artistic.”

  XLI Variant of v. 5: “In their every manner of leaf.” Variant of “interesting” in v. 16: “bigger.”

  The Shepherd in Love. The Portuguese title for this group of eight poems, O Pastor Amoroso, was translated by Pessoa—or, if we like, by an English-language heteronym called Thomas Crosse—as The Lovesick Shepherd. In an unfinished preface to Caeiro’s work, Pessoa-qua-Crosse explained: “In the later poems, his lucid inspiration becomes slightly blurred, a little less lucid. The transformation dates from The Lovesick Shepherd. Love brought a touch of sentiment into this strangely unsentimental poetry. When that love brought disillusion and sorrow, it was not likely that the sentiment should depart. Caeiro never returned to the splendid nonmysticism of The Keeper of Sheep.” Pessoa writing as Campos concurred with this judgment, but noted that these are “among the world’s great love poems, for they are love poems by virtue of being about love and not by virtue of being poems. The poet loved because he loved, and not because love exists.”

 

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