Pessoa Fernando: Poetične misli

Fernando Pessoa: Poetic Thoughts

I doubt, therefore I think.

Fado is a song of a strong soul, a scornful look from Portugal to the God he trusted and who also abandoned him.

Most people think with their sensitivity, while I feel with my thoughts.

To create a work and then recognize it as bad is a tragedy of the soul that is especially great when you realize that it is the best work that could have been done. to create.

To be understood means to prostitute yourself.

Fernand Pessoa's choice of aphorisms arose spontaneously.
Reading, namely, his Book of Restlessness (because it is a book that can be read constantly, therefore, the ideal of a book) I noticed that from the lyrical-thoughtful fragments - which make up that specific "novel without facts" as it says in the subtitle - certain sentences stand out as aphoristic thoughts.
Great a number of top literary works are interwoven with aphoristic notes that readers are happy to underline, but none of these works is a collection of aphorisms to such an extent that a book can be assembled from them alone, as is the case with Pesso's work. Day after day, or more precisely, evening after evening, while reading the Book of Restlessness, I wrote down aphoristic notes on pieces of paper simply because I could not resist...
What is the value of an aphorism?
Aphorism, we know, is the end of imagination because it achieves a higher synthesis, a higher knowledge than the intellectual, logical one, because it is final; it is a knowledge in which there is no more hesitation, no more arguments for and against. The truths of these findings no longer need to be proven, they are proven a priori. The truth of the aphorism is always the same, no matter from which side it is checked, because it is from that truth that it started. This is precisely where all the conclusions of logic fall, because in the system of logic the basic thoughts, premises, cannot be proven, they are arbitrary, which basically makes them untrue. Therefore, logic retrieves only the unimportant from the world.
Who can even reach an aphorism? Certainly not the one who lives on the mind and logic, on partial and unimportant knowledge, but the one who knows about the world as much as can be known (and we know from Socrates that nothing can be known) all that is truly important, because he treats him not as an intellectual, but as a sage for whom contradiction, paradox, the foundation of an aphorism is not a stumbling block, but the cornerstone of the world.
This is exactly the kind of Pesso's thought that lives not from logic but from insight, deeper knowledge, which is reached a combination of intellect and intuition, that is, intellect and sensibility, and where the greatest profit is derived precisely from "knowing that nothing is known", because the one who thinks he knows (as an intellectual thinks, using only his mind, logic), only he knows nothing, because he limited himself to "yes" where there is also "no", so that "yes" is only half true if we pretend that we know nothing about "no". Therefore, this "yes" is not true at all, because a half-truth cannot be the truth. Truth is only what is contradictory in itself, because language, as a means of understanding truth, only reaches truth as a contradiction.
All Pesso's aphorisms were based on the understanding that the world is contradictory in itself, and is therefore based on paradox, and this paradoxicality of the world is also the source of its unrest because where paradox reigns there is no peace, there is only truth as paradox!
Peace reigns where there is no paradox, in a world of lies, dogma, ideologies, single-mindedness - clearly, a false peace, the peace of a sick mind.
Picking up aphorisms, that is, the wisdom that fell on me, as it were, outside the basic, lyrical line of the novel on which the novel's structure rests, Pessoa presented himself to me as a contemporary of Confucius, and created in me a kind of parallel reading, on the one hand, reading the Book of Unrest as a specific lyrical-thoughtful novel, on the other hand, as a book of aphorisms that somehow took on a life of its own, which is and the reason for separating them from the whole.
Where did the need to single out aphorisms come from?
I started to single out aphorisms so that I could return to them, so that they would always be at hand when I needed them, and the man who thinks he and are needed every day as a weapon against the global dumbing down brought to us by the increase in the power of the media, especially television. We see that already in Pessoa's time (Pessoa was born in 1888 and died in 1935) stupidity took deep roots, but still incomparable to today. Pessoa, on the other hand, detected the roots of this stupidity with incredible lucidity, not with Western intelligence, but with Eastern wisdom. The American positivist attitude towards life, which has based the entire value system of the world on that false "yes" which pretends that there is no "no", is brainwashing us every day from the pages of numerous magazines, especially those for young people, newspapers, and above all from the television screen, which is the most difficult to resist. Newspapers and magazines do not have to be bought yet, but television will be watched... And what kind of messages do we receive from television, from its countless films, series, quizzes, documentaries, "reality shows" and the like? Precisely those that Pessoa deconstructs for us with aphorisms as the notorious lies of life that are imposed on us as truths.
"In today's life, the world belongs to the stupid, the insensitive," he says in one fragment. Doesn't it sound very contemporary and familiar?
What are the lies that are served to us as truths every day and what is their purpose? Let's answer the latter first: their purpose is to turn man into a tool, to dehumanize and robotize him as much as possible, so that he would not be useful, to make as much money as possible from him, because there will be no profit from the one who "abdicates".
Man, therefore, should be dumbed down, sold him a horn for a candle, convince him that he is not what he is and that he is what he is not, brainwash him, reduce his freedom to the freedom to work, spend and have fun, to act, especially on competition, on victory over others, would he not think as little as possible, that is, base his value system on the importance he has for others, and not for himself, reduce it to use value, because only such can be useful to others.
Most people think that what they live has importance, Pessoa tells them that "nothing matters", because living means nothing else "than knitting a sock from other people's intentions".
Pesso's paradoxes, separated like this, in a global flood lies, they are an invaluable support for the eternally lonely opinions of those who have abdicated and are still only ostensibly holding on to the world. Pessoa turns that appearance into a solid counter-world, and the "aphorisms" themselves are the pillars of that world, what holds it up, and thus us with it. It is one thing to draw us into his novelistic world, from which, after reading, we still have to come out, and quite another to give us firm footholds against life, as Pessoa does, especially in the aphoristic part of his works. The aphorism achieves a direct connection to our own reflections, confirming, clarifying and expanding them, and at the same time these reflections expand the meaning of aphorisms in directions that they may not have had in their own context.
I therefore believe that this somewhat violent act of separating parts from the whole is justified.