My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
Interpretation
Dreams can provide a temporary escape, but they are insufficient to protect us from reality's harsh truths.
In this quote, Fernando Pessoa suggests that while dreams may offer temporary solace or protection from life's challenges—much like an umbrella does during a storm—they ultimately lack the power to shield us from the more profound and often overwhelming aspects of reality. The metaphor of the 'thunderbolt' highlights the inevitability of confronting life's difficulties, making it clear that dreams, though comforting, are not an adequate defense against reality's trials.
In practice
In a presentation about the importance of confronting reality, I might use this quote to illustrate the futility of relying solely on dreams.
I have at this moment so many fundamental thoughts, so many truly metaphysical things to say, that I suddenly get tired and decide not to write any more, not to think any more, but to allow the fever of speaking to make me sleepy, and with my eyes closed, like a cat, I play with everything I could have said.
It's been months since I last wrote. I've lived in a state of mental slumber, leading the life of someone else. I've felt, very often, a vicarious happiness. I haven't existed. I've been someone else. I've lived without thinking.
We all have two lives: The true, the one we dreamed of in childhood And go on dreaming of as adults in a substratum of mist; the false, the one we love when we live with others, the practical, the useful, the one we end up by being put in a coffin.
I'm a man for whom the outside world is an inner Reality.
The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.
Friends: not one. Just a few acquaintances who imagine they feel something for me and who might be sorry if a train ran over me and the funeral was on a rainy day.
Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals.
When we gaze at a star in the Milky Way which is 50,000 light-years away from our sun, we are looking back 50,000 years in time." "The idea is much too big for my little head." "The only way we can look out into space, then, is to look back in time. We can never know what the universe is like now. We only know what it was like then. When we look up at a star that is thousands of light-years away, we are really traveling thousands of years back in the history of space.
If you can understand the inner life, then you can wear the uniform, the tattoos, or whatnot and realize that the things that are different about us become superficial.
The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.
Do ask yourself why you, the individual, exist, and if you can get no other answer try for once to justify the meaning of your existence as it were a posteriori by setting before yourself an aim, a goal, a 'to this end', an exalted and noble 'to this end'.
Give obedience where 'tis truly owed.
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