Fernando Pessoa: A Little Larger than the Entire Universe

Fernando Pessoa believed that Fernando Pessoa did not exist. In his poetry he demonstrated this idea by splitting himself into multiple personas and writing from their perspectives.

Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888. He lived there until age 7 and for the majority of his adult life. However, from age 7 to 17 he lived with his mother in Durban. It is likely that his existential self doubt was inspired at a young age by the clash of cultures and language he experienced when he moved to Durban. Pessoa expressed his being in Lisbon through the voice of Alvaro de Campos. In published articles and literary magazines Campos often criticized Pessoa for being too rational, and for the "mania of believing that things can be proved."

"I don't believe in anything but the existence of my sensations; I have no other certainty, not even of the outer universe conveyed to me by those sensations. I don't see the outer universe, I don't hear the outer universe, I don't touch the outer universe. I see my visual impressions; I hear my auditory impressions; I touch my tactile impressions. It's not with the eyes but with the soul that I see; it's not with the ears but with the soul that I hear; it's not with the skin but with the soul that I touch. And if someone should ask me what the soul is, I'll answer that it's me." -From Alvaro de Campos's Notes For the Memory of My Master Caeiro

The reason for Pessoa's creation of Alvaro de Campos was both the need to confront the part of him that starved the senses by searching for reason, or to indulge the part of him that maintained that ability/curse.

"It's before I take opium that my soul is sick.
To feel life is to wilt like a convalescent,
And so I seek in opium's consolation
An East to the east of the East.
This life on board is sure to kill me.
Fever rages in my head day and night.
And although I search until I'm ill,
I can't find the spring to set me right."
-from Opiary by Alvaro de Campos

vs.

"Whether I'm happy or sad? ...
Frankly I don't know.
What does it mean to be sad?
What is happiness good for?
I'm neither happy nor sad.
I don't really know what I am.
I'm just one more soul that exists
And feels what God has ordained.
So then, am I happy or sad?
Thinking never ends well...
For me sadness means
Hardly knowing myself ...
But that's what happiness is ...
-20 August 1930 by Fernando Pessoa

The clear difference between these two writers is that Alvaro de Campos is tormented with feeling and Pessoa is tormented by questioning and analyzing. Campos's writing style is passionate and rich, while Pessoa's style is a simply written stream of consciousness.

Throughout his life Pessoa indulged in the habit of focusing on theoretical problems (the existence of God, good vs. evil, the meaning of life, the meaning of death the limits of consciousness, the concept of love, etc.) instead of the process of simply living. His alter ego, Alberto Caeiro, was uneducated, lived in the country, and strived to "see things as they are, without any philosophy."

"I'm not a materialist or a deist or anything else. I'm a man who one day opened the window and discovered this crucial thing: Nature exists. I saw that the trees, the rivers, and the stones are things that truly exist. No one had ever thought about this. I don't pretend to be anything more than the greatest poet in the world. I made the greatest discovery worth making, next to which all other discoveries are games of stupid children. I noticed the Universe, The Greeks, with all their visual activity, didn't do as much." - From an interview with Alberto Caeiro

I wonder if it was on purpose that Alberto Caeiro's beliefs come off as intensely philosophical. Alberto Caeiro's poetry is written by Pessoa to contradict his own fixation on existentialism. Although contradictory, both methods of thinking are philosophical.

"I believe in the world as in a daisy,
Because I see it. But I don't think about it,
Because to think is to not understand.
The world wasn't made for us to think about it
(To think is to have eyes that aren't well)
But to look at it and to be in agreement.
I have no philosophy, I have senses...
If I speak of Nature it's not because I know what it is
But because I love it, and for that very reason,
Because those who love never know what they love
Or why they love, or what love is."
-from The Keeper of Sheep by Alberto Caeiro

vs.

"I don't know who I dream I am...
Suddenly all the seawater in the port is transparent
And I see on the bottom, like a huge print unrolled across it,
This entire landscape, a row of trees, a road glowing in that port,
And the shadow of a sailing ship older than the port and passing
Between my dream of the port and my looking at this landscape,
And it approaches me, enters me,
And passes to the other side of my soul..."
-from Slanting Rain by Fernando Pessoa

Caeiro often focuses on word choice and repetition in his poetry. In the poem above his choice to use the word 'because' repetetively reflects his ability to answer questions. Contrarily, Pessoa's poem is poses a question and demonstrates thematic detail instead of careful planning.

Pessoa's third heteronym, Ricardo Reis, was a physician and classicist who wrote poems about the need to accept fate and odes to the vanity of life.

"I was born believing in the gods, I was raised in that belief, and in that belief I will die, loving them. I know what the pagan feeling is. My only regret is that I can't really explain how utterly and inscrutably different it is from all other feelings. Even our calm and the vague stoicism some of us have bear no resemblance to the calm of antiquity and the stoicism of the Greeks." -from Ricardo Reis's unfinished preface to his Odes.

"Time passes
And tells us nothing.
We grow old.
Let us know how,
With a certain mischief,
To feel ourselves go.
Taking action
Serves no purpose.
No one can resist
The atrocious god
Who always devours
His own children.
Let us pick flowers.
Let us lightly
Wet our hands
In the calm rivers,
So as to learn
Some of their calmness.
Sunflowers forever
Beholding the sun,
We will serenely
Depart from life,
Without even the regret
Of having lived. "
-From 12 June 1914 by Ricardo Reis

vs.

Everything, except boredom, bores me.
I'd like, without being calm, to calm down,
To take life every day
Like a medicine -
One of those medicines everybody takes.

I aspired to so much, dreamed so much,
That so much so much made me into nothing.
My hands grew cold
From just waiting for enchantment
Of the love that would warm them up at last.

Cold, empty
Hands.
-6 September 1934 by Fernando Pessoa

Juxtaposed, these two poems illustrate the argument Pessoa has with himself over the relevance of time passing, the relevance of existing. Reis writes poetry with concise statements. He is bluntly knowledgeable. Pessoa writes with long sentences, suggesting incomplete thoughts.

The fourth, and least accurate heteronym was Fernando Pessoa himself.

"I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I'm less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all." - Fernando Pessoa

Pessoa believed that his singular being did not exist. He embraced the idea that he was composed of multiple beings.

Unlike Virginia Woolf, Pessoa did not channel his emotions and thoughts into characters or the suspension between literature and reality, he channeled them through his own self. Pessoa acknowledged the different elements of his person and used writing as a way to separate them.Woolf's writing is code while Pessoa's poetry is therapy. However, both writers used the process of writing to evade the chaos of confusion within the self.