Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality - it's all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I'm attending here is a show with another set. And the show I'm attending is myself.
Interpretation
This quote reflects on the transient nature of identity and reality, suggesting a deep sense of disconnection from one's self.
Fernando Pessoa's quote expresses the feeling of losing one's essence and the fluidity of identity. It conveys a sense of existential crisis, where the speaker perceives their memories, thoughts, and personality as fleeting, almost as if they are merely watching a performance of their own life rather than actively participating in it. This highlights the complexities of self-awareness and the struggle to understand one's true self amidst changing experiences.
In practice
In a discussion about the nature of identity, this quote could illustrate how people's sense of self can change over time.
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.
My dreams are a stupid refuge, like an umbrella against a thunderbolt.
The chill of what I won't feel gnaws at my present heart.
I do not confer praise or blame: I accept. I am the measure of all things. I am the center of the world.
I did used to have nightmares about the idea that when I die, there is a spark of consciousness which basically creates the world. 'Is the world going to disappear if this spark of consciousness disappears? And how do I know it won't? How do I know there's anything there except what I'm conscious of?'
It is necessary to posit something which is necessary of itself, and has no cause of its necessity outside of itself but is the cause of necessity in other things. And all people call this thing God.
Strength is but one aspect of power.
Look at your life in contrast with the magnitude of creation, space and time. Your life becomes insignificant. Ego disappears.
Our misery comes, not from work, but by our getting attached to something. Take for instance, money: money is a great thing to have, earn it, says Krishna; struggle hard to get money, but don't get attached to it. So with children, with wife, husband, relatives, fame, everything; you have no need to shun them, only don't get attached. There is only one attachment and that belongs to the Lord, and to none other.
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