As I was informed of my misanthropic behavior this evening, I walked home to my 12 by 12 foot refuge of flannel sheets, multiple pillows and down comforters to be alone. I am tired these past days, not mentally because of school, nor of any physical exertion. I feel drained due to the emotionally taxing situations that present themselves to me without my asking. I question whether I allow these individuals to take advantage of my congenial and understanding self, if I am offering my experience obtained knowledge for too cheap a price...it is a rare treat in the day when I am challenged for these are the only moments when I feel my emotional batteries getting recharged. (sigh) Anyhow, I was readin through Oscar Pessoa's "Book of Disquiet" - the book of choice at the moment for the calming of my soul. Funny how today's few pages refer to the escape into the written word...and even addresses the "petty" annoyances of spelling errors...i should not let such minimal things get in the way...need to work on that. I put the passage from this evening here, thought quite long, for future remembering why words are my own personal escape...(warning: there will be typos - as i am tired and have no desire to proofread right now...for this i apologize to all...)


the first real snow...


"I envy the people - well, i don't know if I actually envy them - whose biographies are written or who write their own. In these disconnected impressions, which I deliberately leave disconnected, I shall narrate my autobiography in an indifferent sort of way, without facts; my history without life. These are my Confessions, and if I don't say anything in them, it's because I really have nothing to say.

'What does it matter that someone confesses his worthiness or that he serves some useful purpose? What happens to us either happens to everyone or only to us: in the first instance it's banal; in the second it's incomprehensible. By writing what I feel, I can cool the febrile sensibility of mine. What I confess is unimportant, because nothing is important. I compose landscapes out of what I feel. I compose carnivals of sensations. I completely understand women who embroider out of grief or knit because life exists. My old aunt used to play solitaire during the course of infinite family gatherings. These confessions of feeling are my solitaires. I don't read them, the way people read cards to know the future. I don't put a stethescope to them, because in solitaire the cards don't really have any value. I unravel like a multicolored skein, or I make yarn figures out of myself that are like the ones braided by tense hands and passed from one child to another. I just take care that my thumb doesn't miss making the final knot. Later I turn my hand over and the image changes. And I start over.

'Living is knitting according to the intentions of others. But as we do it, out thoughts are free and all the enchanted princes can stroll through their parks between the instants when the hooked ivory needle sinks into the yarn. I crochet things...I digress...Nothing...

'In any case, what can I count on about myself? A horrible perspicacity about my sensations and the profoun awareness of the fact that I am feeling...An acute intelligence as regards destroying myself and a power to dream that is eager to amuse me...A dead will and a capacity for reflection that dandles as if it were a living child...Yes, crocheting...

'As an artistic modality, I prefer prose to verse for two reasons. The first, my own personal reason, is that I really have no choice, because I can't write verse. The second is common to all of us, and is not - I firmly believe - a shadow or disguised version of the first. It's worthwhile going into the difference between verse and prose in detail because it's related to the intimate sense of all calue in art.

'I consider verse an intermediate thing, a passage from music to prose. Like music, verse is limited by rhythmic laws that, even if they are not the rigid laws of metrics, exist nevertheless as decorum and constraint - automatic precepts that oppress and punish. In prose we speak freely. We can include musical rhythms and still think. We can include poetic rhytms and still be outside them. An occassional poetic rhythm does not disrupt prose; an occassional prose rhythm makes verse stumble.

'All art is contained in prose - in part because the whole world is constrained in language, in part because words set free contain all possibilities for expression and thought. In prose we give everything by transposition: the colors and forms painting can only give directly, in itself, without formal body, without that second body that is an idea; without the structure the architect has to form from hard, given, external things that we erect out of rhythm, indecision, duration, and fluidity; without the reality, which the sculptor must leave in the world, without any aura or transubstantiation; without, finally, poetry in which the poet, like an initiate in a secret society, is subject, albeit voluntarily subject, to an order and a ritual...

'Everything is connected. Reading the classics, which do not talk about sunsets, has made many sunsets, in all their colors, intelligible to me. There is a relationship between syntactic competency, by which we can tell the worth of people, and the sounds and forms and the capacity to understand when the blue of the sky is really green and what degree of yellow exists in the blue green of the sky.

'In reality, it's the same thing - the ability to distinguis and to make subtle distinctions. Without syntax there is no lasting emotion. Immortality is a creation of grammarians.

'I like talking. Better put: I love to palavar. Words for me are palpable bodies, visible sirens, sensualities made flesh. Perhaps because real sensuality has no interest for me of any kind - not even mental or oneiric - my desire metamorphosed into something within me that creates verbal rhythms or listens to them in others. I tremble if people speak well. Pages in Fiahlo or Chateaubriand make my entire life boil in my veins, make me rave in a tremulously quiet way because of an unreachable pleasure I'm experiencing. A certain page, even in the cold perfection of Vieira's syntactic engineering, make me shake like a branch in the wind, in the passive delirium of a thing moved.

'Like all great enthusiasts, I love the delight of losing myself, in which I suffer the pleasure of giving myself over totally. And so, many times, I write without wanting to think, in external daydreaming, allowing the words to play around me, as if I were a little girl hanging on their necks. They are sentences without meaning, softly flowing, in a fluidity of felt water, a forgetting oneself on the shore where the waves mix and lose definition, always becoming others, succeeding each other. In the same way, ideas, images, tremulous with expression, pass through me in sonorous corteges like silk dyed in varied shades, where the moonlight of ideas spins, whirling and confused.

'I weep for nothing that life brings nor takes away. Nevertheless, there are pages of prose that have made me weep. I remember, as if I were seeing it now, the night in which, when I was small, I read for the first time and anthology that celebrated passage of Vieira's about King Solomon, "Erected then King Solomon a palace..." And I went on reading to the end, trembling and confused. Then I burst into happy tears, in a way no real happiness had ever made me weep, the way no sadness in life will ever force me to imitate. That hieratic movement of our clear, majestic language, that expression of ideas in inevitable words, like water flowing downhill, that vocalic astonishment in which the sounds are ideal colors - all that overwhelmed me like a grand political emotion. And as I said, I wept. Today, remembering, I weep again. It isn't - it really isn't - nostalgia for childhood, for which I have no nostalgia: it is nostalgia for the emotion of that moment, the grief of not being able to read that great symphonic certainty again for the first time.

'I have no political or social feelings. But in a certain sense I do have a highly patriotic feeling. My country is the Portugese language. It wouldn't bother me if Portugal were invaded or conquered, unless I were personally incommoded. But I hate, with true hatred, with the only hatred I feel, not those who write Portugese badly, not those who are ignorant of syntax, not those who spell phonetically, but the badly written page, as if it were a living person. I hate incorrect syntax as if it were a person to beat, incorrect spelling as if it were phlegm spit at me, independently of the person who spit it.

'Yes, because spelling is people. Words are complete when both seen and heard...

'Even though my soul belongs to the language of the Romantics, I can only find tranquility reading the classics. Their very narrowness, through which their clarity is expressed, comforts me in ways I can't understand. I gather from them the happy impression of a long life that contemplates wide spaces without exploring them. The pagan gods themseleves take a rest from mystery.

'Our officious analysis of sensations (at least of the sensations we are supposed to have) - the identification of the heart with the landscape, the anatomical revelation of all our moods, the use of desire as will and aspiration as thought - all these things are too familiar to me to seem novel in someone else or to confer tranquility on me. Whenever I feel them, I wish - exactly because I am feeling them - to be feeling something else. And when I read a classic, that something else is given to me.

'I confess it without hiding it or feeling shame. There is no passage in Chateaubriand or poem by Lamartine - texts that on so many occasions seem to speak my own thoughts, poems that so often seem spoken to me so I can know - that enraptures me or raises me up like a prose passage from Vieira or one or another ode by those of our classic authors who really followed Horace.

'I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I stop being myself and disperse. And what I read, instead of being likfe on of my suits, which I barely notice and which would annoy me id I did, is the great cliarity of the external world, the sun everyone sees, the moon that beats the quiet earth with shadows, the long spaces that end up in the sea, the black solidity of trees nodding their green crowns, the solid peace of ponds on estates, paths overgrown with vines on low hills.

'I read the wasy one might abdicate. And like the royal crown and mantle, which are never as huge as when the king who departs leaves them on the floor, I pile my triumphs on top of tedium, sleep on the mosiacs in the antechambers, and ascend the staircase with the unique nobility of vision.

'I read the way one might stroll. And it is in the classics, the calm ones, those which if they suffer do not say so, that I feel myself to be a sacred trespasser, an anointed pilgrim, who for the reason contemplates the meaningless world, Prince of the Grand Exile, who, as he departed, gave the last beggar the final offering of his desolation."

-O. Pessoa ["Book of Disquiet" - sections 4-8]