So I'm reading this book, and god damn, is it really possible to live life and be this depressed? I've never felt so saddened by a book before.
What are your thoughts in general?
>>7448309
>is it really possible to live life and be this depressed
what, do you think he was dead the whole time and was depressed?
>>7448472
Shit man, if my life was basically what he wrote, I would've hung myself a long time ago.
>>7448493
please go back to facebook faggot
>>7448493
By writing he bears witness. But the real answer is that it's obviously his programming and he lacked the constitution for suicide.
>>7448309
>pls seed :ยด(
>>7448309
where the fuck are people getting the black classic version? all I can find is the ugly as fuck modern classic version
>>7448919
>depression must lead to suicide
Ideology 2bh
best translation?
>>7448967
he's meming. it's a reference to that show about detectives that has all the normies raving.
It's an accurate reflection of my life, probably the most accurate I've read so far (although the levitating guy in Pale King is like me also)
>>7448919
>So was Pessoa basically a pre-tumblr tumblrina? Lots of thoughts but zero action?
Please fuck off. You are shitting up /lit/ with your stupidity.
On asking little from life
>"I asked for very little from life, and even this little was denied me. A nearby field, a ray of sunshine, a little bit of calm along with a bit of bread, not to feel oppressed by the knowledge that I exist, not to demand anything from others, and not to have others demand anything from me - this was denied me, like the spare change we might deny a beggar not because we're mean-hearted but because we don't feel like unbuttoning our coat"
p.16
On his writing and potential audience
>"Sadly I write in my quiet room, alone as I have always been, alone as I will always be. And I wonder if my apparently negligible voice might not embody the essence of thousands of voices, the longing for self-expression of thousands of lives, the patience of millions of souls resigned like my own to their daily lot, their useless dreams and their hopeless hopes"
p.16
On impulses and sentiments which do not endure
>"Futile and sensitive, I'm capable of violent and consuming impulses - both good and bad, noble and vile - but never of a sentiment that endures, never of an emotion that continues, entering into the substance of my soul [...] My soul is impatient with itself, as with a bothersome child; its restlessness keeps growing and is forever the same. Everything interests me, but nothing holds me"
p.20
On writing his feelings
>"If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant."
p.21
On being incapable of escaping unhappiness
>"Whenever I've tried to free my life from a set of the circumstances that continuously oppress it, I've been instantly surrounded by other circumstances of the same order, as if the inscrutable web of creation were irrevocably at odds with me"
p.26
On waking up and feeling unprepared to exist
>"I'd woken up early, and I took a long time getting ready to exist. I paced from one side of the room to the other, dreaming out loud incoherent and impossible things - deeds I'd forgotten to do, hopeless ambitions haphazardly realized, fluid and lively conversations which, were they to be, would have already been. And in this reverie without grandeur or calm, in this hopeless and endless dallying, I paced away my free morning, and my words - said out loud in a low voice - multiplied in the echoing cloister of my inglorious isolation"
p.31
On living a vegetative life
>"In my own way I sleep, without slumber or repose, this vegetative life of imagining, and the distant reflection of the silent street lamps, like the quiet foam of the dirty sea, hovers behind my restless eyebrows"
p.34
On retreating into one's self
>"I retreat into myself, get lost in myself, forget myself in faraway nights uncontaminated by duty and the world, undefiled by mystery and the future."
p.36
On the external world as a nightmare
>"...and a deep and weary disdain for all those who work for mankind, for all those who fight for their country and give their lives so that civilization may continue [...] a disdain full of disgust for those who don't realize that the only reality is each man's soul, and that everything else - the exterior world and other people - is but an unaesthetic nightmare, like the result, in dreams, of a mental indigestion. My averstion to effort becomes an almost writhing horror before all forms of violent effort."
p.37
On nausea and being a stranger in the company of others
>"It's not the cracked walls of my rented room, nor the shabby desks in the office where I work, nor the poverty of the same old down-town streets in between, which I've crossed and recrossed so many times they seem to have assumed the immobility of the irreparable - none of that is responsible for my frequent feeling of nausea over the squalor of daily life. It's the people who habitually surround me, the souls who know me through conversation and daily contact without knowing me at all - they're the ones who cause a salivary knot of physical disgust to form in my throat. It's the sordid monotony of their lives, outwardly parallel to my own, and their keen awareness that I'm their fellow man"
p.37 / 38
On always being sad
>"All the pent-up bitterness of my life removes, before my sensationless eyes, the suit of natural happiness it wears in the random events that fill up each day. I realize that, while often happy and often cheerful, I'm always sad. And the part of me that realizes this is behind me, as if bent over my leaning self at the window, as if looking over my shoulder or even over my head to contemplate, with eyes more intimate than my own, the slow and now wavy rain which filigrees the grey and inclement air"
p.42
On the filthiness of never changing
>"Only as a lack of personal hygiene can I understand my wallowing in this flat, invariable life I lead, this dust or filth stuck on the surface of never changing"
p.42
On dying
>"Whoever lives like me doesn't die: he terminates, wilts, dries up. The place where he was remains without him being there; the street where he walked remains without being being seen on it; the house where he lived is inhabited by not-him. That's all, and we call it nothing: but not even this tragedy of negation can be staged to applause"
p.44
On life's destructive horror
>"But the horror that's destroying me today is less noble and more corrosive. It's a longing to be free of wanting to have thoughts, a desire never to have been anything, a conscious despair in every cell of my soul's body. It's the sudden feeling of being imprisoned in an infinite cell. Where can one think of fleeing, if the cell is everything?"
p.45
>normalfags
On one's external appearance disguising one's internal state
>"And I walk, I roam, I keep going. Nothing in my movements (I notice by what others don't notice) transmits my state of stagnation to the observable plane. And this spiritless state, which would be natural and therefore comfortable in someone lying down or reclining, is singularly uncomfortable, even painful, in a man walking down the street"
p.46
On company and solitude
>"Solitude devastates me; company oppresses me. The presence of another person derails my thoughts; I dream of the other's presence with a strange absent-mindedness that no amount of my analytical scrutiny can define."
p.48
On isolation
>"Isolation has carved me in its image and likeness. The presence of another person - of any person whatsoever - instantly slows down my thinking, and while for a normal man contact with others is a stimulus to spoken expression and wit, for me its a counterstimulus [...] When all by myself, I can think of all kinds of clever remarks, quick comebacks to what no one said, and flashes of witty sociability with nobody. But all of this vanishes when I face someone in the flesh: I lose my intelligence, I can no longer peak, and after half an hour I just feel tired. Yes, talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial, and in them intelligence gleams like in image in a mirror"
p.48 / 49
On daydreams
>"Romanticism is merely the turning inside out of the empire we normally carry around inside us. Nearly all men dream, deep down, of their own mighty imperialism: the subjection of all men, the surrender of all women, the adoration of all peoples and - for the noblest dreamers - of all eras."
p.54
On his appearance in an office photo
>"I've never had a flattering notion of my physical appearance, but I never felt it to be more insignificant than there, next to the familiar faces of my colleagues, in that line-up of daily expressions. [...] My gaunt and inexpressive face has no intelligence or intensity or anything else to raise it out of the lifeless tide of faces. [...] 'You came out really well,' Moreira said suddenly. And then, turning to the sales representative: 'It's his spitting image - don't you think?' And the sales representative agreed with a happy affability that tossed me into the rubbish bin."
p.57
On people in the street
>"I suppose that most of the people I chance to pass in the street also feel - I notice it in their silently moving lips and in their eyes' vague uncertainty, or in the sometimes raised voice of their joint mumbling - like a flagless army fighting a hopeless war. And probably all of them [...] share with me this sense of menial squalor, of definitive defeat amid reeds and scum, with no moonlight over the shores or poetry in the marshes."
p.60
On being ineligible to live
>"My hapless peers with their lofty dreams - how I envy and despise them! I'm with the others, with the even more hapless, who have no one but themselves to whom they can tell their dreams and show what would be verses if they wrote them. I'm with these poor slobs who have no books to show, who have no literature besides their own soul [...], and who are suffocating to death due to the fact they exist without having taken that mysterious, transcendental exam that makes one eligible to live."
p.61
On the nobility of failure
>"It's noble to be timid, illustrious to fail to act, sublime to be inept at living."
p.62
On despising happy people
>"Let's not forget to hate those who enjoy, just because they enjoy, and to despise those who are happy, because we don't know how to be happy like them."
p.62
On wanting to poison the lives of happy people
>"How I'd love to infect at least one soul with some kind of poison, worry or disquiet! This would console me a little for my chronic failure to take action. My life's purpose would be to pervert. But do my words ring in anyone else's soul? Does anyone hear them besides me?"
p.66
On being incompatible with others
>"The cause of my profound sense of incompatibility with others is, I believe, that most people think with their feelings, whereas I feel with my thoughts."
p.71
On dreams as a shelter from life
>"My dreams are a stupid shelter, like an umbrella against lightning. I'm so listless, so pathetic, so short on gestures and actions. However deeply I delve into myself, all of my dreams' paths lead to clearings of anxiety."
p.79
On sensitivity and suffering
>"every visible edge cuts the skin of my soul. Every harsh thing I see wounds the part of me that recognizes its harshness. Every object's visible weight weighs heavy inside my soul. It's as if my life amounted to being thrashed by it."
p.79
On one's identity when not performing for others
>"I become so small and innocuous, so alone in a room so large and sad, so profoundly sad! Who am I, finally, when I'm not playing? A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness and to eat the bread offered by Fantasy. [...] When will all of this end - these streets where I drag my misery, these steps where I coldly crouch and feel the night running its hands through my tatters?"
p.85
On embracing the meaningless of life
>"The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to doggedly pursue and activity he recognizes is useless, to observer a discipline he knows is sterile, and to adopt norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential."
p.86
his book truly is underrated
>>7448309
>is it really possible to live life and be this depressed?
Yes.
