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Saturday, January 11, 2003
posted by gbarto at 2:54 AM:
Wandering through Barnes and Noble today, I stumbled upon Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet (click link to purchase), translated by Richard Zenith. Having heard the author's name, I looked out of curiosity. The book is the "autobiography" of a bookkeeper who considers himself to have no life and writes a great deal about this fact. The cover blurbs hail it as a deconstructionist work years ahead of deconstruction. In spite of this, it's not bad at all. For some reason it reminds me of Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet, though I cannot put my finger on why. Here are a few quotes that amused; the numbers after refer to chapters.We never know self-realization.
We are two abysses - a well staring at the sky. -11
Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods. -24
To give each emotion a personality, a heart to each state of the heart! -26
To express something is to conserve its virtue and take away its terror. -27
To go from the phantoms of faith to the ghosts of reason is only to change cells. Art, if it frees us from the abstract idols of old, should also free us from magnaminous ideas and social concerns, which are likewise idols. -34
I envy all people, because I'm not them. -38
I particularly like the quote from chapter 34, which speaks to a problem that persists today - the conviction of those with "scientific" minds that they have access to a higher truth. They can be every bit as embarrassing as Jerry Falwell - and as clueless as to how much fanatical self-righteousness has crept into their thinking. If Dante were writing the Inferno today, it would be fitting for him to have Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Noam Chomsky and Carl Sagan sentenced to spend eternity in the same discussion group, nestled in some circle of smugness.
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