I’m losing my taste for everything, including even my taste for finding everything tasteless.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a sense of apathy towards life and the struggle to find meaning or enjoyment in experiences.
In this quote, Fernando Pessoa conveys a deep existential crisis where he reflects on his detachment from the world around him. He suggests that he has lost interest not only in the pleasures of life but also in the very act of critiquing or evaluating those pleasures as tasteless. This portrays a profound sense of ennui and intellectual fatigue that can accompany periods of despair or disillusionment.
In practice
During a discussion on existentialism, one might refer to this quote to illustrate feelings of disconnection.
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.
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
There's that popular misconception of man as something between a brute and an angel. Actually man is in transit between brute and God.
Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'
A person is either himself or not himself; is either rooted in his existence or is a fabrication; has either found his humanhood or is still playing with masks and roles and status symbols. And nobody is more aware of this difference (although unconsciously) than a child. Only an authentic person can evoke a good response in the core of the other person; only person is resonant to person.
Where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal anarchy amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand; For hot, cold, moist, and dry, four champions fierce, Strive here for mast'ry.
It strikes me as unfair, and even in bad taste, to select a few of them for boundless admiration, attributing superhuman powers of mind and character to them. This has been my fate, and the contrast between the popular estimate of my powers and achievements and the reality is simply grotesque.
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