Beyond-God e beyond-being: Uncreated and Yearning in ...



Beyond-God and beyond-being: Uncreated and Yearning in Fernando Pessoa

Paulo Borges

(University of Lisbon)

Our working supposition is that one of the main sources in Pessoa’s work is to be found in the experience that there is something in the subject, which is former both to the constitution of the world and his presence in it, as well to what traditionally is presented as its absolute principle, God. The feeling and the memory of this anteriority unfold in the experience of non coincidence between himself, or the common identity that the subject ascribes to himself and the world ascribes to him, and a deeper dimension which can’t be objectified or characterized, that he fore-feels as an hidden nature not lost at all, as it is present in the sense of its own absence and is reachable at different levels of consciousness, and that throws the subject into the restlessness of a fundamental dissatisfaction and inadequacy with what life, the world and its own subjectivity offer him. Among other compositions of the young Pessoa, we believe this is displayed in the important 35 Sonnets, written in English between 1910 and 1912, and corrected until their publication in 1918. The confirmation of our supposition would show the remarkable rooting of Pessoa’s work in that literature of a yearning exile[i], that strongly characterizes the Portuguese tradition and that raises to a theoretical consciousness of itself in the work of Teixeira de Pascoaes and other members of the movement Renascença Portuguesa, whose magazine, “A Águia”, introduced Pessoa to his first appearance before the public with an essay about the “pantheist transcendentalism” of the “new Portuguese poetry”, from Antero de Quental until Pascoaes and his followers[ii]. A substantial part of Pessoa’s modernism and sensationism would then precede and depend from what, apparently, it refuses the most, the mystical-metaphysical experience implied in the traditional yearning lyrics, that in the poet raise to the simultaneously sweet and sour experience of the union-scission in the uncreated[iii].

Some of the 35 Sonnets allow a clear exemplification of this. Firstly, the sonnet XXIV, here transcribed:

“Something in me was born before the stars

And saw the sun begin from far away.

Our yellow, local day on its wont jars,

For it hath communed with an absolute day.

Through my Thought’s night, as a worn robe’s heard trail

That I have never seen, I drag this past

That saw the Possible like a dawn grow pale

On the lost night before it, mute and vast.

It dates remoter than God’s birth can reach,

That had no birth but the world’s coming after.

So the world’s to me as, after whispered speech,

The cause-ignored sudden echoing of laughter.

That’t has a meaning my conjecture knows,

But that’t has meaning’s all its meaning shows”[iv]

If we take the first four verses, the statement that “something” in himself was “born before” the appearing of the symbols of what is more remote, visible and glowing in the world, watching it “from far away”, can be read as the expression of inherency in the uncreated and the absolute vision of the origins that unfolds in it, all the more since in the presence of this communion “with an absolute day” the perception of every day’s life is emphasized as something repetitious and aged[v]. It isn’t just about stating a birth and a presence former to a particular set of inner-world beings, in this particular case the stars, but to confess the experience that, when something comes into being, he is already there. There is “something” in the subject which precedes the appearance of everything, being at the same time presence and absolute vision. Thus, it can’t be accidental that what distinguishes itself as the object of this vision happens to be precisely the sunrise, that prestigious image of the appearing and unveiling of things, so relevant in the human experience and the metaphysical and ontological western and planetary imaginary, as demonstrated both by the word origin (from the Latin orior, meaning the appearing of the stars, but employed specially in reference to the sun; where the notion of orient comes from) and by the link between eôs (dawn) and eón (being, presence)[vi], indicating the being as an appearing, a manifestation, not to forget the platonic affinity between the “Sun” and the “Good”[vii], in line with the mythical-metaphysical Indo-European representation[viii]. What stands out in this Pessoa’s poem is the undetermined, pre-original and pre-manifested instance, which is immanent in the subject as transcendence and vision of everything that is and appears. One could say that it is the unconditioned of this transcendence, through which it is nothing of what is and appears, that turns round in the totality of the vision that contemplates the own rising of the condition of possibility of all life and visibility[ix].

In the following four verses it is particularized in what consists this anteriority and transcendence, whose experience, though considered to be past, keeps being present in a hidden way, as a light that can’t be objectified and is dragged by the poet “through the night” of his “Thought”, such as the “trail”, only “heard” but never seen of a “worn robe”. In this splendid image, what the poet brings with himself at any moment and becomes present, along and beyond the obscurity of the thought directed to the worldly things, is that same vision of its original appearing. Described, nevertheless, as the “Possible” or the dawn of the manifestation that, instead of triumphing and accomplishing in firm and obvious realization and being, looses glow and clearness and becomes undefined, moving back to the darkness, silence and vastness of the unmanifest, such as “a dawn grown pale / on the lost night” that precedes it. It isn’t after all absolutely “lost”, then, as the image suggests, gradually as the subject gets forward having the horizon as an object enlightened by his own looking, always the dragged tail of his robe, invisible but audible, ties him to that unmanifest and makes it present in a sensitive, though trans-objective, way. It is in the latent presence of the “Night” of the unmanifest or uncreated, everlasting former and wider than the day of the manifestation, that the other “night”, the one of the “Thought”, is accused of not being able to catch a glimpse of that in the heart from where it rises and constitutes, neither the vision of universal potentiality, nor the unlimited that precedes it and to where after all it returns.

It is this double instance, felt but ignored both in conceptual and intellectual terms, since it is transcendent to thought, that the subject carries any moment within himself. And it is this, the uncreated and the full vision of universal potentiality, in other words, what in the subject is transcendence and absolute anteriority, that we can understand in the next triplet as “remoter” than “God’s birth”, that consisted in no more than the “world’s coming after”. The uncreated and the full vision of the possible, inherent to the subject, are transcendental and former to a God that only appears as such through the constitution of the world, even if the creative or manifestation principle belongs to him. Without the appearing of the world, as a created or manifested effect, that would neither be nor appear as principle and God, remaining in that primordial indeterminacy, which can’t be something else than one and unique, that for this reason can’t be anything but the “something” which is irreducibly transcendent and former to all. Thus, what in this case is stated is “something” that in the subject transcend all that is possible and all the real, including what traditionally is pointed out and represented as its transcendent source, God himself, that in this context, while presupposing an otherness at an ideal and real level, is just a determined, manifested and created form of that “Possible” and of that absolute uncreated that the subject brings within himself. Indeed, if what one thinks to be God is after all the absolute itself, it coincides with that “something” that there is in the subject and that transcends everything. However, to apprehend it and nominate it as “God” implies that the experience one makes of him is made in the duality between a subject and an object or a cause and an effect, conferring him a determination that refers him to the domain of what has a beginning, a concept and predicates. Thus, the latent uncreated in the subject is irreducible to any divinization, as well as to any theology and metaphysics. To divinize him and think him both as God to the human conscience and as God to himself is to diminish and degrade him from the absolute to the domain of the relation.

Pessoa seems to move here, in what concerns the western tradition, on the line of Plotinus, where the transcendence of the ineffable one excludes the thinking and the being for himself, distancing from Aristotle’s vision[x] that is prolonged, secularized, in Hegel’s one. He shows as well a remarkable affinity with the Master Eckhart ‘s vision-experience of a primordial state of absolute immanency, where what will be determined as subject is “free from God and everything”; it is just as far as it willingly exiles from there and constitutes itself as a “created being”, that, together with the appearing of the “creatures”, this ineffable depth is determined as God for himself and for them[xi]. That’s why, in this eternal uncreated condition, “unborn” and fore-subjective, former to the determination of the self, the world and God, the future subject “is above God” while “principle of the creatures”[xii], whereas, in reality, it is his not less eternal “birth” or passage to the subjective and transient determination that originates the determination of “everything” and of “God” himself as such[xiii].

This affiliation in the western tradition extends to the eastern one as well, and between one and the other to the handling of the matter in the portuguese tradition, where at least since Antero the vital and impersonal absolute, present at the deepest bottom of the subject and the universe, transcends all the personification, divinization and cult, understood as the “Idolatry” that shrouds him when he is nominated as “God”[xiv]. It is an important matter of the contemporaneous portuguese thought, present in the vision of “God” in Pascoaes as “the only perfect atheist”, among whose diverse meanings stands out the one that “God”, while absolute, is not God for himself[xv], being instead an infinite source of possibilities, out of which totality the manifested God as such is but one: “In the Infinite all is possible, even God himself !”[xvi]. A converging perspective can be found both in José Marinho and Agostinho da Silva, among others, and the most significant is that it always precedes and converges to one experience-summit of transcending what traditionally is presented as the transcendent itself.

If in Pessoa, sometimes, the surpassing of God is presented as a desire as intense as the prayer of Master Eckhart in order that God liberates him from him[xvii], however without an addressee, as when he speaks of the “overflowing, absurd desire of a satanic kind that preceded Satan, that one day – a day without time or substance – one will find a escape outward from God and the deepest in us will give up, I don’t know how, being a part of being or of not being”[xviii], in another text, perhaps from the same period of rewriting of the 35 Sonnets, with a clear gnostic and oriental influence and in a heterodox dialogue with theosophy, it is stated, nevertheless, that “God, the God Creator of Things” is “just a manifestation” of the “Unique”, that, while a emanating “center of the creative” and affirmative “powers”, is itself “an Illusion”. “God is the Supreme Lie”, not as a simple false belief of the human mind, but as a process of self-illusion of a being and conscience equivocated as to their own reality: “God exists, in fact, to himself; but God is wrong”; “God thinks he exists, but he doesn’t”. The divine conscience suffers from the illusory belief in its intrinsic existence that affects all beings, which are not absolutely, since “the being itself is but the Not-Being of the Not-Being, the deadly statement of Life”. In an easier way, the being of all beings, including the one from God, is just a determination – and, therefore, one denial – of the unthinkable that transcends the “Unique” itself and that, stranger to the “Intelligence”, through it and for it is thought as “Not-Being”[xix].

This denunciation of the equivoque of the divine being for himself, besides the contusive metaphysical blasphemy that strikes straightly against the “I am who I am” of the revelation in Exodus (3, 14), ground of the Christian onto-theology, raises the question of who is the one that is able to state the divine mistake of existing for himself. Going back to the commented sonnet, we believe that it only can be the uncreated “something” that there is in the subject, the transcendent “spectator” – an expression of Pascoaes to name the same[xx] - which, former to everything, witnesses the total spectacle of the birth and constitution of the world, including God’s one, that just through the becoming of things will be determined as such. Former to the world and to God, seeing that God is subsequent to the world, we understand that in the presence of this uncreated and contemplative instance the world can be as a “sudden echoing of laughter” without a known cause. If its traditionally supposed cause, that is, God, is after all its effect, the becoming of the world appears expressed by an image of a pure and spontaneous irruption. As it is said in the last lines, one conjectures that it has a sense, but this sense doesn’t display more than its conjectural existence and not what it really is. The experience narrated in the poem is of a radical and absolute pre-existence in the subject, former to the world and God, that allows him the vision of universal becoming with a spontaneity whose sense is undetermined and irreducible to any reason, entity or specific finality.

A second sonnet, XXXI, seems to confirm the most relevant features of this experience, introducing some new elements.

“I am older than Nature and her Time

By all the timeless age of Consciousness,

And my adult oblivion of the clime

Where I was born makes me not countryless.

An exile’s yearnings through my thoughts escape

For daylight of that land where once I dreamed,

Which I cannot recall in colour or shape

But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed

And yet is not as light remembered,

Nor to the left or to the right conceived;

And all round me tastes as if life were dead

And the world made but to be disbelieved.

Thus I my hope on unknown truth lay; yet

How but by hope do I the unknown truth get ?”[xxi]

Here, the subject asserts as well to be former to “Nature” and “its Time”, claiming perhaps for a timeless “Consciousness”, that precedes metaphysically the level where the temporal nature of things and beings is developed. Yet, as a new element in this experience, appears the yearning as that disturbing, desiring tie between what the subject is at the level of the temporality and the “clime” or “land” where “once” it was born and dreamed. This burning desire that rises from an experience of “exile”, this yearning, as a tie to what is really desired, is intimately articulated with the knowledge of being former to everything that is developed at the level of the temporality. Though there is an “adult oblivion” of that primordial dimension of oneself, which is perhaps the one of a childhood simultaneously metaphysical and of age, this oblivion inherent to the being that develops temporally doesn’t bereave absolutely the subject of that metaphysical country or nation, of that place of timeless consciousness, where he appeared and somehow always lasts previous to the temporal nature. The own conscience of the “exile” and the “oblivion” show the belonging to something that transcends them, assured by the yearning as a desire of returning to the daylight of that instance where once was lived the experience of dreaming, that is, of the non-limitation of what is possible. As in the precedent sonnet, in a very similar vision and expression, it is through the night of thinking and of the thoughts, that is, of the conceptual level of the mind, connoted with the darkness[xxii], that the yearning escapes demanding the daylight that has been previously experienced. Here is sketched a movement of vertical and metaphysical returning, which is complementary to that former dragging of the non-objective primordial vision of the possible and the uncreated in the midst of existence.

However, by determining the yearning vision of that metaphysical space of an original belonging, Pessoa recognizes in it the same non-representable trans-objectivity. Being impossible to “remember in colour or figure” or to conceive as one of the terms of an antinomy, it isn’t after all “as light remembered”, though it shades its present experience as something that “hath gleamed”. The yearning is an impulse and movement towards the reintegration of what transcends any representation, image and concept at all.

Finally, as in the precedent sonnet, this feeling of a yearning belonging, in union and scission, to something former and transcendent to everything, but that can’t be enjoyed fully, turns into a lack of potentiation of the experience in the world. It is larger here than behind, because all that is around the subject has the flavour of “dead” life and the world appears to him as deprived of reality[xxiii]. Accompanying this disbelief in the world, the sonnet ends with the statement that just through “hope” one will reach the “unknown truth” where it is entrusted. This “hope”, as an alternative way of a knowledge that transcends the limits and the fallibility of thinking and of the conceptual and imagistic representations, seems to come close to what we understand here by yearning, that is, the burning desire of the metaphysical instance that the subject states as his own place. Hope is, in fact, one of the elements in the definition of “saudade” (yearning) in Teixeira de Pascoaes: “If remembrance is its soul, the desire, the hope is the flesh and the living blood of its body”[xxiv].

In another English sonnet of Pessoa is confirmed the presence of yearning as the painful tie and burning desire of the subject to what it feels and remember as its primordial place, before being born, living and dying, when is stated the “old sadness for the immortal home” that accompanies it in the “widening circle of rebirth”, each time that the “soul”, in its journey, arrives at a “new flesh” and “try again the unremembered earth”[xxv]. Should be remarked here that what is remembered yearningly is essentially the metaphysical fatherland and what is forgotten is the “earth” of the incarnated existence, where supposedly one has to relearn mournfully to live every time that prenatal home is abandoned.

In the remaining poetry in English language, Pessoa often expresses this experience which is converted into one mystical-metaphysical impulse towards the liberation of the being conditioned by life and existence. Abreast of the yearning as the inmost breath of that impulse, we find immediate and effective experiences of the transfiguration of the perception of reality that could be framed in the “peak experiences” of Maslow[xxvi], in the “savage mystic” of Michel Hulin[xxvii] and, generally, in the so-called “altered states of consciousness”[xxviii]. In “Anamnesis”, from 1915, a landscape is evoked, painful for its extreme beauty, where “great antenatal flowers” recall to the subject his “lost life, before God”, also referred as his lost “childhood before Night and Day”[xxix]. The double meaning of “before” opens two possibilities of interpretation, although both are confirmed in other Pessoa’s compositions. If in both cases it goes back to a pre-existence, the reminiscence could be from a “lost life” in the presence of God or former to his appearing, following what we found in the first commented sonnet. But this alternative can be transcended, allowing a more unitary reading of many poems, if we remember that in Pessoa, as in Pascoaes and in other portuguese thinkers, what conventionally is named as “God” can point out to something that is not “God” for himself, like that furtive “King of Gaps”, the “unknown king” that reigns over the space between things and beings, a stranger to the categories of time and space, without a beginning or an end, “void presence” that is nothing but a “chasm” and from which it is said: “All think that he is God, except himself”[xxx]. This abyssal and empty instance, to which Pessoa’s subject so often seems to be more intimate than to himself, indicates in this vision what escapes from the God’s mistake that “thinks he exists, but he doesn’t” [xxxi]. Anyway, this or that antenatal childhood is not absolutely or irremissibly lost, as in the poem that expresses the experience of a communion with “the lost thing that gleams”. In it, the poet feels himself “God’s moon’s node, / A child again, outside life’s road”, remembering him, though inversely, the same sense of separation that he had when he awoke “from God” and felt the “world” around him[xxxii]. It is this sentiment of a pre-existence in the infinite and unconditioned, be it God or what precedes the appearing of the experience and the idea of God, it is this sentiment of having had “a self and life / Before this life and self”[xxxiii], associated with the experience of returning to him, due to the strength of yearning that changes time into something vertically reversible, that is expressed in the vehement desire of going beyond oneself, of being another, of having a perception not conditioned by the self and of dissolving after all in God as the true “self” and “home”, mixing in “His peace” like “a scent with the breeze”[xxxiv]. On the other hand, abreast and as a complement of that mystical reencounter and desire of a union that frees from time, place and word[xxxv], there is the feeling that in it become possible new and transfigured forms of experience of oneself and the world. That “Foreself” is one “unknown being”, where the conventional self vanishes and “mazes of I” will open into another experience “where to see is to know”, free from the “vain vision” of the dualistic perception of the conglobating[xxxvi]. Those are the “happy hours” of life, when the subject feels that it is not living, not centered in himself[xxxvii]. Or, in another approach, when the liberation of the conventional self and the return to the unutterable bottom without bottom of everything flourishes in one vision-communion in which all the things are intimately connected and “outward” and “inward” become “one”, so as “disparity” and “unity”, revealing a “New God” inseparable from the experience of oneself as “center” of “nothing”-“all”[xxxviii]. The vision of “how God everything is” transfigures the subject, who proclaims to be “another”, feeling that the “senses” belong not to him, deepening so the divine totality in such a way that leads him to feel “like a child-king crowned”, “robed with sky and ground”[xxxix]. The possibility of this somewhat pantheistic ecstasy appears, however, accompanied by another possibility, more radical in our opinion, which is the effective dissolution of all referents of meaning, as it happens in the composition expressively called “The Abyss”, where the poet paradoxically speaks of an inner “impossible stream” that drags to a “sea” always unattainable “all the things” from which his “thought is made of – Thought / Itself”, “the ideas of God, of World, / Of Myself and of Mystery”[xl]. In this experience, truly without a bottom, all the common referents are dissolved – God, I/man, world – that structure and condition both the traditional metaphysics and their deconstructions.

Thus, we believe that in the original experiences from where proceed these mystical-metaphysical orientations of the English poetry can be found the grounds of many of the most well-known motives of Pessoa’s production, namely the constitutive emptiness and insubstantiality of the subject, that changes him into the stage of the psychodrama of the autodemiurgic heteronimy – “I can imagine anything of myself, because I’m nothing. If I were something, I couldn’t imagine”[xli] - , and the “being” / “feeling everything in all manners”[xlii], a Dionysian and simultaneous assumption of all possibilities in and from their matrix’s abyss.

(translation by Jorge Telles de Menezes)

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[i] Cf. Patrice Cambronne, Chants d’Exil. Mythe & Théologia Mystique, foreword by Alain Michel, Bordeaux, William Blake and Co. / Ar & Arts, 1997; Maria José de Queiroz, Os Males da Ausência ou a Literatura do Exílio, Rio de Janeiro, Topbooks, 1998; Cláudio Guillén, O Sol dos Desterrados. Literatura e Exílio, translated into Portuguese by Maria Fernanda de Abreu, foreword by Almeida Faria, Lisboa, Editorial Teorema, 2005.

[ii] Cf. Fernando Pessoa, A Nova Poesia Portuguesa, in Obras, II, edited with forewords and notes by António Quadros, Porto, Lello & Irmão – Editores, 1986, pp. 1145-1203.

[iii] About the yearning (saudade) in Pessoa, cf. the yet always rich work of Alfredo Antunes: Saudade e Profetismo em Fernando Pessoa. Elementos para uma Antropologia Filosófica, Braga, Publicações da Faculdade de Filosofia, 1983.

[iv] Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XXIV, in Poesia Inglesa, I, edition and translation by Luísa Freire, Lisboa, Assírio & Alvim, 200, p. 56.

[v] Cf. the paradigmatic experience, already present in Antero de Quental, in the sonnet “Torment of the Ideal”: “I knew Beauty that doesn’t die / And I got sad. […]” – Sonetos, edition, introduction and notes by Nuno Júdice, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1994, p. 45.

[vi] Cf. Carlos Silva, “Dos Signos Primitivos”, Análise, vol. 2, n.º 1 (Lisbon, 1985), published by Publicações GEC, pp. 189-275, p. 205 and note 119, p. 251. Cf. P. Chantraine, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque. Histoire des mots, Paris, Klincksieck, 1968; Ch. H. Khan, “The Verb “Be” in Ancient Greek”, in AAVV, The Verb “Be” and its Synonyms. Philosophical and Grammatical Studies, ed. by J. W. M. Verhaar, Dordrecht-Boston, Reidel Publications, 1973.

[vii] C. Plato, A República, 508 b-c.

[viii] Cf. Mircea Eliade, Tratado de História das Religiões, Lisboa, Cosmos, 1977, pp. 161-163.

[ix] In the sonnet VII, as a complement of this pre-existing in relation with the stars, the subject states that he comprises them, developing with this a questioning argument of his immortality: “Shall that of me that now contains the stars / Be by the very contained stars survived ?” – Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XXIV, in Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 22.

[x] Cf. Aristotle, Metafísica, A 7, 1972 b 19. Cf. Plotin, Enéadas, VI2, 7, 37, pp. 111-112; 7, 41, p. 117; 8, 9, p. 145; 8, 12-13, pp. 148-150. Cf. Paulo Borges, “O desejo e a experiência do Uno em Plotino”, Philosophica,, n.º 26 (Lisbon, November, 2005), pp. 175-214.

[xi] Cf. Meister Eckhart, Pr. 32, in Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, edited and translated by Josef Quint, Zurich, Diogenes, 1979, pp. 304-305 and 308.

[xii] Cf. Ibid., p. 308.

[xiii] Cf. Ibid., p. 308. Cf., on these issues, Paulo A. E. Borges, “Ser ateu graças a Deus ou de como ser pobre é não haver menos que o Infinito. A-teísmo, a-teologia e an-arquia mística no sermão “Beauti pauperes spiritu...”, de Mestre Eckhart”, in Philosophica, 15 (lisboa, 2000), pp. 61-77.

[xiv] “Que vivi sei-o bem...mas foi um dia,/ Um dia só – no outro, a Idolatria / Deu-me um altar e um culto... ai ! adoraram-me, // Como se eu fosse alguém ! como se a Vida / Pudesse ser alguém ! – logo em seguida / Disseram que era um Deus... e amortalharam-me!” – Antero de Quental, Sonetos, p. 107.

[xv] Cf. Teixeira de Pascoaes, Santo Agostinho (comentários), Porto, Livraria Civilização, 1945, pp. 275-276.

[xvi] Id., Duplo Passeio, in A Beira (num relâmpago) / Duplo Passeio, Obras Completas, X, introduction and critical notes by Jacinto do Prado Coelho, Lisboa, Livraria Bertrand, 1975, p. 187.

[xvii] “Darum bitten wir “Gottes”, da( wir “Gottes” ledig werden...”, “Darum bitte ich Gott, da( er mich Gottes quitt mache” – Mestre Eckhart, Pr. 32, in Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, pp. 305 e 308.

[xviii] Bernardo Soares, Livro do Desassossego, in Fernando Pessoa, Obras, II, edition, introduction and notes by António quadros, Porto, Lello & Irmão – Editores, 1986, p. 601.

[xix] Cf. Rafael Baldaia, Tratado da Negação, in Fernando Pessoa, Textos Filosóficos, organization, introduction and notes by António de Pina Coelho, I, Lisboa, Ática, 1993, pp. 42-44.

[xx] Cf. the references of Pascoaes to the “spectator” that “isn’t no angel, neither demon”, to the “contemplative and eternal spectrum” or, more radically, to the “souls [that are] only soul”, that not only don’t participate in the drama and fall of the divine demiurge - being not as the “poets, accomplices of God in the crime of the Creation” -, as well as they “don’t even pretend to be spectators” – Teixeira de Pascoaes, O Bailado, introduction by Alfredo Margarido, Lisbon, Assírio & Alvim, 1987, 11-13, 78, 86, 88-89, 99.

[xxi] Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XXXI, Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 70.

[xxii] Cf. also another expression very alike: “closed sea and black night of Thought” – Ibid., XX, p. 48.

[xxiii] The proximity is even bigger with “Tormento do Ideal” , Antero’s sonnet mentioned before: “Thus I saw the world and what it encloses / To loose the colour, […] – Antero de Quental, Sonetos, p. 45. The feeling about the false reality of the world, associated with the incapacity of thought to know truly, are also well emphasized in sonnet XXVI: “The world is woven all of dream and error / And but one sureness in our truth may lie - / That when we hold to aught our thinking’s mirror / We know it not by knowing it thereby”; “We know the world is false, not what is true. / Yet we think on, knowing we ne’er shall know” – Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XXXI, Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 60.

[xxiv] Cf. Teixeira de Pascoaes, “Os meus comentários às duas cartas de António Sérgio”, A Águia, n.º 22, II Série (Porto, 1913), in AAVV, Filosofia da Saudade, selection and edition by Afonso Botelho and António Braz Teixeira, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 1986, p. 72; O espírito lusitano ou o saudosismo, in Ibid, p. 25.

[xxv] Cf. Fernando Pessoa, “35 Sonnets”, XX, Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 48.

[xxvi] A. H. Maslow, Religions, values and peak-experiences, Columbia, Ohio State University Press, 1974.

[xxvii] Cf. Michel Hulin, La Mystique Sauvage, Paris, PUF, 1993.

[xxviii] Cf. Georges Lapassade, Les états modifiés de conscience, Paris, PUF, 1987.

[xxix] Cf. Fernando Pessoa, “Anamnesis”, Poesia Inglesa, I, pp. 256 and 258.

[xxx] Cf. Id., “The King of Gaps”, Ibid., p. 280.

[xxxi] Cf. Rafael Baldaia, Tratado da Negação, in Fernando Pessoa, Textos Filosóficos, p. 44.

[xxxii] “I feel me God’s moon’s node,/ A child again, outside life’s road,/ Remembering how I found me/ When I awoke from God/ And felt the world around me” – Id., “Chalice”, Ibid., pp. 258 and 260. This last experience should be compared with the sentiment of a sudden fall from a remote “aerial” and glowing world into the “circus” of beasts of existence, in Antero de Quental – “No Circo”, Sonetos, p. 132.

[xxxiii] Cf. Fernando Pessoa, “The Foreself”, Poesia Inglesa, I, p. 274.

[xxxiv] Cf. Id., “To One Singing”, Ibid., pp. 272 and 274.

[xxxv] “One day, Time having ceased, / Our lives shall meet again, From Place and Name released./ Only that shall remain/ Of each of us that may/ Seem natural to that Day” – Id., “Summerland”, Ibid., p. 302.

[xxxvi] “There are mazes of I./ I am my unknown being,/ I have, I know not why,/ Another kind of seeing/ (Other than this vain vision/ That is my soul’s division/ From what girds sight about)/ Where to see is to know,/ […]” – Id., “The Foreself”, Ibid., p. 276.

[xxxvii] “My life has happy hours:/ ‘Tis when I feel not living” – Ibid., p. 276.

[xxxviii] Cf. Id., “Fiat Lux”, Ibid., pp. 288, 290 and 292.

[xxxix] Cf. Id., “A Summer Ecstasy”, Ibid., p. 292 and 296.

[xl] Cf. Id., “The Abyss”, Ibid., p. 286.

[xli] Cf. Bernardo Soares, Livro do Desassossego,edited by Richard Senith, Lisbon, Assírio & Alvim, 1998, p. 185. Cf. Paulo A. E. Borges “”Posso imaginar-me tudo, porque não sou nada”. Vacuidade e auto-criação do sujeito em Fernando Pessoa” in Pensamento Atlântico, Lisboa, Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2002, pp. 319-332; “Posso immaginarmi tutto perché non sono niente. Se fossi qualcosa non potrei immaginare”. Vacuità e autocreazione del soggetto in Fernando Pessoa”, Simplegadi – Rivista di Filosofia Interculturale, Anno 9, n.º 25 (Padova, Ottobre 2004), pp. 65-80 (translation by Antonio Cardiello).

[xlii] Cf. among many other places, Fernando Pesoa, answer to “Portugal, vasto Império”, survey by Augusto da Costa, in Obras, III, introductions, organization, bibliography and notes by António Quadros, Porto, Lello & Irmão – Editores, 1986, pp. 703-704; Álvaro de Campos, “Passagem das Horas”, in Obras, I, introductions, organization, bibliography and notes by António Quadros and Dalila Pereira da Costa, Porto, Lello & Irmão – Editores, 1986, p. 933.

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