My hapless peers with their lofty dreams--how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, the even more hapless, who have no-one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with those poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature beside their own soul, and who are suffocating to death due to the fact that they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a deep sense of envy and despair over unfulfilled dreams and the isolation of creativity.
In this quote, Fernando Pessoa reflects on the feelings of inadequacy and envy he experiences towards his peers, who have lofty dreams and the means to express them. He feels trapped among those who have no external validation or creative outlets, emphasizing a profound longing to share and manifest his own dreams and thoughts, which leads to a sense of existential suffocation and a yearning for recognition and connection through literature and art.
In practice
In a speech at a creative writing workshop, one might quote this to inspire vulnerability and sharing among budding authors.
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.
That God cannot lie, is no advantage to your argument, because it is no proof that priests can not, or that the Bible does not.
The center of every man's existence is a dream.
Forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.
So that it must be only by the imagination that Satan has access to the soul, to tempt and delude it, or suggest anything to it. And this seems to be the reason why persons that are under the disease of melancholy are commonly so visibly and remarkably subject to the suggestions and temptations of Satan... Innumerable are the ways by which the mind may be led on to all kind of evil thoughts, by the exciting of external ideas in the imagination.
The (method of) correction shall by a turn become distortion, and the good in it shall by a turn become evil.
Children are still the way you were as a child, sad and happy in just the same way-and if you think of your childhood, you once again live among them, among the solitary children.
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