One day I shall analyze this, one day I shall examine better, discriminate, the elements of my character, for my curiosity about all things, linked to my curiosity about myself and my own character, will lead to an* attempt to understand my personality.

It was on account of these characteristics that I wrote, describing myself, in “A Winter Day”:*

One like Rousseau ...
A misanthropic lover of mankind.

 

I have, as a matter of fact, many, too many, affinities with Rousseau. In certain things our characters are identical. The warm, intense, inexpressible love of mankind, and the portion of selfishness balancing it—this is a fundamental characteristic of his character and, as well, of mine.

My intense patriotic suffering, my intense desire of bettering the condition of Portugal provokes in me—how to express with what warmth, with what intensity, with what sincerity!—a thousand plans which, even if one man could realize them, he would have to have one characteristic which in me is purely negative—the power of will. But I suffer—on the very brink of madness, I swear it—as if I could do all and was unable to do it, by deficiency of will.

...

Besides my patriotic projects—writing of “Portuguese Regicide” to provoke a revolution here, writing of Portuguese pamphlets, editing of older national literary works, creation of a magazine, of a scientific review etc.; other plans consuming me with the necessity of being soon carried out—Jean Seul projects,* critique of Binet-Sanglé,* etc.—combine to produce an excess of impulse that paralyzes my will. The suffering that this produces I know not if it can be described as on this side of insanity.

Add to all this other reasons still for suffering, some physical, others mental, the susceptibility to every small thing that can cause pain (or even that to a normal man could not cause pain), add to this other things still, complications, money difficulties—join all this to my fundamentally unbalanced temperament, and you may be able to suspect what my suffering is.

One of my mental complications—horrible beyond words—is a fear of insanity, which itself is insanity. (...)

Rule of Life

 

1. Make as few confidences as possible. Better make none, but, if you make any, make false or indistinct ones.

2. Dream as little as possible, except where the direct purpose of the dream is a poem or a literary product. Study and work.

3. Try to be as sober as possible, anticipating sobriety of body by a sober attitude of mind.

4. Be agreeable only by agreeableness, not by opening your mind or by discussing freely those problems that are bound up with the inner life of the spirit.

5. Cultivate concentration, temper the will, make yourself a force by thinking, as innerly as possible, that you are indeed a force.

6. Consider how few real friends you have, because few people are apt to be anyone’s friends.

7. Try to charm by what is in your silence.

8. Learn to be prompt to act in small things, in the trite things of street life, home life, work life, to brook no delay from yourself.

9. Organize your life like a literary work, putting as much unity into it as possible.

10. Kill the Killer.

THE MARINER

 

Pessoa wrote his only complete play, O Marinheiro (The Mariner), in 1913, a year before Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos burst onto the scene, and the essential drama, or non-drama, of the mature author is all contained here, in seed form.* Perhaps not by accident there are three characters in the play who act, or who don’t act—three women who impassively sit, watching through the night over the corpse of a fourth woman. A fifth character, intuited but not actually perceived by the women, seems to hold the perhaps nonexistent key to the mystery of their lives, which is really just the mystery of what makes them talk, for that is the only thing that sets them apart from the dead woman in the coffin. Everything else in this strange play is suspension. But, come to think of it, even the phrases spoken by the three women are suspended. Like Symbolist precursors of Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir, they spin words that lead to no conclusion, while waiting for they don’t know whom, or what.

Pessoa’s “static drama,” to use his self-contradictory epithet (drama deriving from a Greek verb meaning “to do, to act”), reads like a program or prophecy of the then young poet’s life, for he spent the rest of his years leading a largely solitary existence but producing an astonishing quantity of words so as to make himself into fictitious others, whose reality threatened to overshadow his own. The heteronyms were like the watching women’s verbalized dreams, speeches that seemed like people, a series of nonexistent mariners who noisily occupied the stage of Pessoa’s outwardly quiet life.

The notion that our lives are but the stuff of dreams is a stock theme of classical European drama, as important to a playwright such as Calderon de la Barca as it was to Shakespeare. Pessoa’s point of view was more complex, and in a certain way more optimistic. While endorsing the premise of Calderón’s most famous play, Life Is Dreaming (whose Spanish title is usually and less accurately rendered as Life Is a Dream), Pessoa was ultimately more intrigued by the reverse formulation: dreaming is life. The Mariner is negation, the unending night, a senseless vigil that humanity keeps over its own corpse, its future death, but against this bleak background or, if you will, this blank canvas, a certain kind of life—the dreamed life—thrives. The Second Watcher’s observation that she and her companions could just be part of the mariner’s dream is anathema to their egos but pays homage to the power and possibility of dreams.

The mariner is of course Pessoa, who was notoriously silent about his true past and whose ship blew off course from the world of love and social engagement, depositing him on the isle of his literary imagination. Pessoa is also the Second Watcher, who dreamed up the mariner and the mariner’s dream. And Pessoa is Pessoa, who dreamed the watcher who dreamed the mariner who dreamed a past life that was, perhaps, Pessoa’s.

Renouncing all action, plot, and progress, The Mariner is as much an antidrama as a static one, and Pessoa’s dozens of unfinished plays, including a monumental but vastly disordered Faust, have few positively dramatic qualities to offer. Describing his life’s work as “a drama divided into people instead of into acts,” Pessoa specialized in inventing characters without true plays (or stories) for them to inhabit, and the larger characters—his heteronyms—ended up haunting him, not because they were convincing replicas of carnal realities but because Pessoa felt, or decided, that their other-world reality had every bit as much right to exist.