oh, Pessoa.

Down the steps of my dreams and my weariness, descend from your unreality, descend and be my substitute for the world.

One longed, in order to truly feel life, to be a patient convalescing from an illness.

I created various personalities within myself. I create them constantly. Every dream, as soon as it is dreamed, is immediately embodied by another person who dreams it instead of me. In order to create, I destroyed myself; I have externalized so much of my inner life that even inside I now exist only externally. I am the living stage across which various actors pass acting out different plays...

I did not act the part. It acted me. I was merely the gestures, never the actor.

Civilization consists in giving an appropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities.

Leaning on the bridge, I wait for the truth to pass so that I can regain my null and fictitious, intelligent and natural self...to know nothing about oneself is to live. To know a little about oneself is to think. To know oneself precipitately is suddenly to grasp Leibniz's notion of the dominant monad...a sudden light scorches and consumes everything. It strips us naked even of our selves.




[feeling isolated, angry, anxious deep into the
pit of my stomach self-deprecating and intellectually exhausted.
Reading Pessoa is like stepping into already-familiar words.
I want to sit in a pool of water near a beach, one of those little pockets that becomes stale and lukewarm, watch people swim and feel water droplets slowly evaporate off my skin under white-blind sunlight, experience the chill of close-to-summer-sunset breezes, feel at home in my body again
why are people so inpenetrable and why do I turn away so quickly?]


All text is from Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet. All photos belong to Miranda Lehman and can be found at ghostinthewoods.com