A being who, as I grew older, lost imagination, emotion, a type of intelligence, a way of feeling things - all that which, while it made me sorry, did not horrify me. But what am I experiencing when I read myself as if I were someone else? On which bank am I standing if I see myself in the depths?
Interpretation
The quote reflects on self-perception and the loss of emotional depth with age.
In this contemplative quote, Fernando Pessoa explores the complexities of self-identity and introspection as one ages. He illustrates a sense of loss regarding imagination and emotional intelligence, while also questioning the nature of his own existence and perception, wondering how one can observe oneself from an external standpoint and what that reveals about their inner depths.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a philosophical discussion on the nature of self and identity.
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.
What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other.
Land. If you understand nothing else about the history of Indians in North America, you need to understand that the question that really matters is the question of land.
What know we of the Blest above but that they sing, and that they love?
Men are not governed by justice, but by law or persuasion. When they refuse to be governed by law or persuasion, they have to be governed by force or fraud, or both.
Eliminate the Diaspora, or the Diaspora will surely eliminate you.
The church doesn’t have a social strategy, the church is a social strategy.
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