THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT KNOWING

"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being."

- Michel Foucault

Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

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Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast—or else there is nothing more at all. ~Jean-Paul Sartre

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"The Secret"

don't worry, nobody has the

beautiful lady, not really, and

nobody has the strange and

hidden power, nobody is

exceptional or wonderful or

magic, they only seem to be

it's all a trick, an in, a con,

don't buy it, don't believe it.

the world is packed with

billions of people whose lives

and deaths are useless and

when one of these jumps up

and the light of history shines

upon them, forget it, it's not

what it seems, it's just

another act to fool the fools

again.

there are no strong men, there

are no beautiful women.

at least, you can die knowing

this

and you will have

the only possible

victory.

C.Bukowski

Why are we so full of restraint? ~Henry Miller

VINCENT VAN GOGH.

The Poet's Garden, 1888

“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” Bertrand Russell

“The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.”

Bertrand Russell -------------------

The natural reward for having distanced myself from life was the incapacity I created in others to feel with me. There is an aura of coldness around me, a halo of ice that repels others. I still haven't managed not to suffer with my solitude. How difficult it is to attain that refinement of spirit that allows isolation to be a repose without anguish.

Since I never discovered in myself qualities that would attract anyone, I was never able to believe that anyone would feel attracted by me.

I cannot conceive that people might esteem me out of compassion, because even if I'm physically clumsy and unacceptable, I do not have that degree of organic deformity that would allow me to enter the orbit of the compassion of others, not even into that sympathy such would inspire even if it weren't clearly deserved; and for the man in me who deserves pity, there can be none, because there is never pity for those crippled in spirit. So I fell into that center of gravity of the disdain of others, in which I don't tend toward the sympathy of anyone.

A certain intellectual courage is necessary for an individual to recognize that he is nothing more than a human rag, a living abortion, insane but beyond the the frontiers of institutionalization; but even more courage is necessary, having recognized this, to adapt oneself perfectly to that destiny, to accept without revolt, without resignation, with no gestures or even hints at gestures, the organic curse imposed by nature.

Conceiving myself from the outside was my misfortune - the misfortune for my happiness.

I saw myself as others see me, and I came to disdain myself - not so much because I recognized in myself a list of qualities that in themselves would make me disdain them but because I came to see myself as others see me and to feel the disdain they feel for me.

I suffered the humiliation of knowing myself.

-Fernando Pessoa ----------------------

I had a certain talent for friendship, but I never had friends, either because there weren't any or because the friendship I conceived was an error of my dreams. I always lived in isolation, increasingly so the more I lived conscious of myself.

-Fernando Pessoa

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That uncertain and almost imponderable malice that gladden any human heart when it sees the pain and discomfort of others I apply to the examination of my own pains.

Choosing ways of not acting was always the study and scruple of my life.

I do not submit to the state or to men; I resist inertly. The state only want me for some action or other. Since I do nothing, the state gets nothing from me. Today it has still not killed itself, and it can only incommode me. If that happens, I shall have to put more armor on my spirit and like further within my dreams.

But that has never happened.

The state has never inopportuned me. I think fortune has arranged things that way.

-Fernando Pessoa

Thus, whether we know it or not, we all have metaphysics, thus also, whether we desire it or not, we all have morality. I have a very simple moral code - to do to no one either evil or good. To do no one evil because not only do I recognize in others the same right I judge to be mine - not to be incommoded - but I think that there are enough natural evils to fill the quota of evil the world ought to have.

Am I not doing good because I don't know what good is, or if I'm actually doing it when I think I'm doing it?

And I think, even though helping someone out or clarifying something is, in a certain sense, to commit the evil of intervening in someone else's life.

Goodness is a temperamental caprice: we do not have the right to make others the victims of our caprices, even out of humanity or tenderness. Benefits are things we inflict; that's why I can abominate them so coldly.

If I do no good, because of my moral code, I also do not demand it be done to me.

I am highly sociable but in a highly negative way. I am the incarnation of the inoffensive man.

But I am not more than that, I can't be more than that.

I have a visual tenderness for everything that exists, a tenderness of the intelligence - nothing in my heart.

I don't have faith in anything, hope for anything, charity for anything.

I abominate, with nausea and horror, the sincere people of all sincerities and the mystics of all mysticism or, before and better, I abominate the sincere acts of all sincere people and the mysticisms of all the mystics. That nausea is almost physical when those mysticisms are active, when they try to convince the intelligence of others or to move the will of others to find the truth or to reform the world.

This is my morality or my metaphysics or my self: A passerby in everything - even in my own soul. I don't belong to anything, I don't desire anything, I am not anything - the abstract center of impersonal sensations, the fallen, feeling mirror turned toward the variety of the world. For all that, I don't know if I'm happy or unhappy; nor does it matter to me.

-Fernando Pessoa ---------------------

The more a person is different from me, the more real he seems, because he depends less on my subjectivity. And that's why my attentive and constant study is that very common humanity that repels me and from whom I keep my distance. I love it because I hate it.

-Fernando Pessoa -------------------

What I think produces in me a profound feeling, one I which I live, a feeling of incongruity as far as others are concerned. It's that most people think with their sensibility, while I feel with my thoughts.

-Fernando Pessoa

Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Nostalgia! I feel it even for someone who meant nothing to me, out of anxiety for the flight of time and a sickness bred of the mystery of life. If one of the faces I pass daily on the streets disappears, I feel sad; yet they meant nothing to me, other than being a symbol of all life.— Fernando Pessoa

Isolation carved me in its own image. The presence of another person - of only one person no matter who - immediately slows down my thinking, and, to the same degree that contact with someone else for a normal man is a stimulus to expression and speech, in me that contact is a counterstimulant, if in fact that compound word is a linguistic possibility.

I am capable, alone, by myself, of thinking up innumerable witty remarks, quick retorts to what no one said, fulminations of an intelligent sociability involving no one at all; but all this disappears if I am in the presence of a physical otherness.

I lose my intelligence, I become incapable of speech, and, after a few fifteen-minute periods, I only feel sleepy. Yes, that's right, talking with people makes me want to sleep. Only my spectral, imagined friends, only the conversations I've had that result from sleep have a genuine reality and stand out properly, and in them the spirit is present like an image in a mirror.

-Fernando Pessoa