Fernando Pessoa · Aspects
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Itʾs not surprising that this way of making art seems strange; whatʾs surprising is that there are things that donʾt seem strange.
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The author of these books cannot affirm that all these different and well-defined personalities who have incorporeally passed through his soul donʾt exist, for he does not know what it means to exist, nor wheter Hamlet or Shakespeare is more real, or truly real.
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Having made myself into what I am – at worst a lunatic with grandiose dreams, at best not just a writer but an entire literature – I may be contributing not only to my own amusement (which would already be good enough for me) but to the enrichment of the universe, for when someone dies and leaves behind one beautiful verse, he leaves the earth and heavens that much richer, and the reason for stars and people that much more emotionally mysterious.
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Ever since I was a child, Iʾve felt the need to enlarge the world with fictitious personalities – dreams of mine that were carefully crafted, envisaged with photographic clarity, and fathomed to the depths of their souls. When I was but five years old , an isolated child and quite content to be so, I already enjoyed the company of certain characters from my dreams, including a Captain Thibeaut, the Chevalier de Pas, and various others whom Iʾve forgotten, and whose forgetting – like my imperfect memory of the two I just named – is one of my lifeʾs great regrets.
This may seem merely like a childʾs imagination that gives life to dolls. But it was more than that. I intensely conceived those characters with no need of dolls. Distinctly visible in my ongoing dream, they were utterly human realities for me, which any doll – because unreal – would have spoiled. They were people.
And instead of ending with my childhood, this tendency expanded in my adolescence, taking firmer root with each passing year, until it became my natural way of being. Today I have no personality: Iʾve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom Iʾve served as literary executor. Today Iʾm the meeting-place of a small humanity that belongs only to me.
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PESSOA, Fernando, The Selected Prose, Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. New York: Grove Press, 2001, pp. 2, 3, 4, 261-262.