They cannot comprehend that between being and wishing to be extraordinary there is but the difference of consciousness being added to the second. It is the same case as that of myself playing with tin soldiers at seven and at fourteen years; in one [moment] they were things, in the other things and playthings at the same time; yet the impulse to play with them remained, and that was the real, fundamental psychical state.

I have no one in whom to confide. My family understands nothing. My friends I cannot trouble with these things; I have no really intimate friends, and even were there one intimate, in world’s ways, yet he were not intimate in the way I understand intimacy. I am shy and unwilling to make known my woes. An intimate friend is one of my ideal things, one of my daydreams, yet an intimate friend is a thing I never shall have. No temperament fits me; there is no character in this world which shows a chance of approaching what I dream of* in an intimate friend. No more of this.

Mistress or sweetheart I have none; it is another of my ideals and one fraught, unto the soul of it, with a real nothingness. It cannot be as I dream. Alas! poor Alastor! Shelley, how I understand thee! Can I confide in Mother? Would that I had her here. I cannot confide in her either,* but her presence would abate much of my pain. I feel as lonely as a wreck at sea. And I am a wreck indeed. So I confide in myself. In myself? What confidence is there in these lines? There is none. As I read them over I ache in mind to perceive how pretentious, how literary-diary-like they are! In some I have even made style. Yet I suffer nonetheless. A man may suffer as much in a suit of silks as in a sack or in a torn blanket.

No more.

[An Unsent Letter to Clifford Geerdts]
Faustino Antunes

 

[I am writing you about the] late Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa, who is thought to have committed suicide; at least he blew up a country house in which he was, dying he and several other people—a crime (?) which caused [a] great sensation in Portugal at the time (several months ago). I have been requested to inquire, as far as is now possible, into his mental condition and, having heard that the deceased was with you in the Durban High School, must beg you to write me stating frankly how he was considered among the boys at the said institution. Write me as detailed an account as possible on this. What opinion was held of him? Intellectually? Socially? etc. Did he seem or did he not seem capable of such an act as I have described?

I must ask you to keep, as far as possible, silence in this matter; it is, you understand, very delicate and very sad. Besides, it may have been (how I wish it may have been!) an accident, and in that case our hasty condemnation would itself be a crime. It is just my task, by inquiring into his mental condition, to determine whether the catastrophe was a crime or a mere accident.

An early reply will [be] very much obliged.

Two Prose Fragments
Alexander Search

 

1.

 

Bond entered into by Alexander Search, of Hell, Nowhere, with Jacob Satan, Master, though not King, of the same place:

1. Never to fall off or shrink from the purpose of doing good to mankind.

2. Never to write things, sensual or otherwise evil, which may be to the detriment and harm of those that read.

3. Never to forget, when attacking religion in the name of truth, that religion can ill be substituted and that poor man is weeping in the dark.

4. Never to forget men’s suffering and men’s ill.

October 2nd, 1907
Alexander Search

 

† Satan
(his mark)

2.

 

30 October 1908

No soul more loving or tender than mine has ever existed, no soul so full of kindness, of pity, of all the things of tenderness and of love. Yet no soul is so lonely as mine—not lonely, be it noted, from exterior but from interior circumstances. I mean this: together with my great tenderness and kindness an element of an entirely opposite kind enters into my character—an element of sadness, of self-centeredness, of selfishness, therefore, whose effect is two-fold: to warp and hinder the development and full internal play of those other qualities, and to hinder, by affecting the will depressingly, their full external play, their manifestation.