I'm really curious about / want to read this book. Does /lit/ think it's any good? Is it pleb-tier?
>>7376758
>I'm so special because I understand how crappy boring life is!
It's that for 200 or 500 pages depending on which edition you get.
It's incredible. Get the edition you posted, not the short one.
If you want to read it then just go ahead. The opinion of a bunch of dickheads shouldn't sway you.
>>7376758
It is pleb tier. His other works are better.
AESTHETICS OF ARTIFICIALITY
Life hinders the expression of life. If I actually lived a great love, I would never be able to describe it.
Not even I know if this I that I’m disclosing to you, in thesemeandering pages, actually exists or is but a fictitious, aesthetic concept I’ve made of myself. Yes, that’s right. I live aesthetically as someone else. I’ve sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that’s foreign to my being. Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognize myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone. And if I avoid living, acting and feeling, then believe me, it’s so as not to tamper with the contours of my invented personality. I want to be exactly like what I wanted to be and am not. If I were to give in to life, I’d be destroyed. I want to be a work of art, at least in my soul, since I can’t be one in my body. That’s why I’ve sculpted myself in quiet isolation and have placed myself in a hothouse, cut off from fresh air and direct light – where the absurd flower of my artificiality can blossom in secluded beauty.
Sometimes I muse about how wonderful it would be if I could string all my dreams together into one continuous life, a life consisting of entire days full of imaginary companions and created people, a false life which I could live and suffer and enjoy. Misfortune would sometimes strike me there, and there I would also experience great joys. And nothing about me would be real. But everything would have a sublime logic; it would all pulse to a rhythm of sensual falseness, taking place in a city built out of my soul and extending all the way to the platform next to an idle train, far away in the distance within me… And it would all be vivid and inevitable, as in the outer life, but with an aesthetics of the Dying Sun.
>>7376758
I can read Portuguese, but I've been tempted to buy this edition because this cover slays.
>>7376871
What's happening in the cover? Is it related to the book?
Isn't this book meme-tier?
>>7376758
It's excellent. It is possibly the best book I read all year. There is no author I've ever read who understands loneliness and modern pain better than Pessoa. On top of that, it contains absolutely beautiful creative writing layered with such thought and emotion that you will find yourself rereading a single paragraph for an entire night.
I won't lie, it is not the easiest read. Much of it is admittedly repetitive and half-formed. But this disjointed and unedited quality makes the writing so much more visceral and immediate, like you're watching the author mentally craft the page in front of you in real time, and by the end it will not even seem awkward or difficult.
Get the 500 page edition. Read it twice. Then read it again. It's excellent.
"Falling between buildings, in alternating patches of light and shadow (or of brighter and less bright light), the morning dawns over the city. It seems to come not from the sun but from the city itself, as if sunlight emanated from the walls and rooftops - not from them physically, but because they happen to be there.
To see and feel it makes me feel a great hope, but I realize that hope is literary. Morning, spring, hope - they're linked in music by the same melodic intention; they're linked in the soul by the same memory of an identical intention. No: if I observe myself as I observe the city, I realize that all I can hope is for the day to end, like all days. Reason also sees the dawn. Whatever hope I placed in the day wasn't mine; it was of those who just live the passing hour and whose outer way of understanding I happened, for a moment, to embody.
Hope? What do I have to hope for? The day doesn't promise me more than the day, and I know it has a certain duration and an end. The light heartens but does not improve me, for I'll walk away as the same man - just a few hours older, a feeling or two happier, a thought or two sadder. When something is born, we can feel it as a birth or we can think about it having to die. Now, under the full light of the sun, the city landscape is like an open field of buildings - natural, vast, and harmonious. But while seeing all this, can I forget that I exist? y consciousness of the city is, at its core, my consciousness of myself.
I suddenly remember when I was a child and saw, as today I cannot see, dawn breaking over the city. Back then it didn't break for me but for lie, because back then I (not being conscious) was life. I saw dawn break and felt happy; today I see dawn break, feel happy, and become sad. The child is still there but has fallen silent. I see the way I saw, but from behind my eyes I see myself seeing, and that is enough to darken the sun, to make the green of the trees old, and to wilt the flowers before they open. Yes, I once belonged here; but today, before each landscape, no matter how fresh, I stand as a foreigner, a guest and pilgrim before it, an outsider of what I see and hear, old to myself.
I've seen everything, even what I've never seen nor will ever see. Even the memory of future landscapes flows in my blood, and my anxiety over what I'll have to see again is already monotonous to me.
And leaning on the windowsill to enjoy the day, gazing at the variegated mass of the whole city, just one thought fills my soul: that I profoundly wish to die, to cease, to see no more light shining on this city or any city, to think no more, to feel no more, to leave behind the march of time and the sun like a piece of wrapping paper, to remove like a heavy suit - next to the big bed - the involuntary effort of being."
It made me cry.
>>7377513
Holy shit that's amazing.
